LAND

OF THE

BEAUTIFUL DEAD

R. Lee Smith

This one is for Aaron.

CHAPTER ONE

The ferryman had six more fares in the back of his van and a long way yet to drive, so he didn’t stop at town. He just rolled up to the docking gate, opened up the hatch and told her to get out.

Lan got out, moving carefully along the van’s armored roof and trying not to look at the Eaters clambering below her. They hadn’t seen many on the drive, but there were always Eaters at the towns and this one was pretty big, as towns went these days.

There were kids up on the wall, taking shots at Eaters and smoking. They had bows and buckets of smouldering pitch beside them, but it had rained most of the morning and the dead were too wet to burn, so they were using guns instead, showing off the wealth of a town that could afford to waste bullets on Eaters. When they saw her, one of the kids dropped a ladder and steadied it for her while another jotted down the name painted on the side of the ferry beneath the picture of the red-haired siren with her sword raised high over a heap of decapitated corpses. The Boudicca, it said, which Lan only knew because the ferryman had bragged it up all the way from Morrow-up-Marsh where he’d taken her on.

“Bloody Irish,” said the kid, now turning to her, tapping his stub of a pencil so she’d notice him writing and be impressed. “Welcome to New Aylesbury. What do you want?”

“Just passing.”

“Well, first night’s free if it’s just you, but it’ll be a ‘slip a night for a longer stay, plus the cost of the bed. If you’re set on paying for a bed,” he added. He didn’t look at her when he said it, but she could feel the unspoken invitation hovering between them.

Lan said, “I’m just passing,” again and left it at that. She had no coin, but she had plenty of barter in her rucksack and in any case, he was too young for her. A girl on her own couldn’t afford many scruples, but Lan was not going to be some wall-rat’s first brag just for the price of a bed in some mudlump of a town.

If the kid was disappointed, it didn’t show. He just moved on to the next question. “Where from?”

“Norwood.”

He looked up from his book, smiling beneath puzzled eyes. “Where’s that?”

“Near Lancaster.” She shrugged. “Nearish.”

“And you?”

“Lan.”

The kid rolled his eyes and wrote it down. “Yeah, okay, Lan from Lancaster.”

“Lan,” said Lan in a soft, stony voice. Her mother’s voice. “From Norwood.”

“Whatever you say,” said the kid, not believing her and not caring if she knew it. He made a point of drawing a line through the letters in his book and writing new ones in. This done, he nodded to his friend, who in turn signaled the ferryman below. The kids pulled the ladder up as the ferry drove away, bumping over Eaters and leaving smears of old blood and rotting flesh in its wake. “So, Lan from Norwood,” said the kid, putting his book and pencil away. “What can we do for you?”

“I need another ferry. They come through regular?”

“Yeah, we got a few in, although they’re not leaving until morning. Hey, Jakes!” he called, leaning out from the docking tower. “Got a fare for ya!” He pointed Lan toward one of the kids looking curiously up from a corral of armored ferry-vans and went back to the wall, leaving her to climb down alone. The kids all had vans with pictures of scantily-clad ladies on the side, either posed to do in an Eater or just posed. The one with the kid called Jakes working on it had the stamps of a dozen towns or more painted on the side, underneath the naked lady hacking open Eaters with the machetes she carried in each dainty hand.

“This here’s Big Bertha,” the kid said proudly, wiping a greasy hand on his shirt so she could shake it. “Fastest, meanest bitch on four wheels. Where bound, luv?”

She told him.

He laughed. All the ferrymen laughed. “Not in my ferry. This may not be much of a world, but I’m not leaving it that way.”

“I pay good.”

“You could pay in clean cunny and pure meth, but you’ll still be paying someone else.”

She didn’t argue with him. There wouldn’t be any more ferries this late, so instead she asked him the way to the hostel.

Like all hostels these days, it did double duty as the prison and as the emergency shelter, should the town walls ever fall. Lan took her key and locked herself in the first available cell. A guard came by every so often with boiled water; everything else had a price (although the currency was negotiable, he said, reaching through the bars to stroke at her arm). She had food in her rucksack, but she didn’t want anyone in this strange town to know she had it. She could have used a bath, but knew she’d be watched while she took one. All Lan wanted was to sleep until the next ferryman came through, but she didn’t believe hers was the only key to this cell, so she sat on the lumpy mattress that was her bed and looked out the narrow window at the unnatural mess that was the only sky Lan had ever known. Although no one could seem to agree on exactly how long it had been since Azrael’s ascension, Lan had never known any world but this one. Her mother used to say she remembered, but she’d been a kid—six or seven or maybe only five—when Azrael came.

No one knew who Azrael was or even what. Demon was the popular theory. Azrael never denied it. Neither did he deny sorcerer, Satan, alien, or mutated man. But whatever else he was, Lan’s mother would say, he was Death. As the master of that domain, he had torn his first companions from their rightful rest and set them at his side under new names, without memory, without humanity. Perhaps he expected Mankind to meekly surrender their world to him, to accept his rule without question and worship him without resentment.

“We fought back,” Lan’s mother would always say, should this part of the story come around. ‘We,’ she said, and she said it with pride, she who had been that child of maybe seven, maybe only five. “He raised his so-called children and before the sun had set, we killed them again. Most of them.”

Lan knew how that had gone. Norwood’s sheriff had saved pictures, but even if she hadn’t, plenty of people still talked about it, whether or not they were old enough to remember. They were proud of it, proud of the troops who had broken down the doors of Azrael’s first home, slaughtering the newly-raised corpses where they stood unresisting, until Azrael fell on them. Before the sun had set, Lan’s mother would say, and before that same sun had risen again, Azrael and his three remaining Children had fled, but not far. He was back soon enough, bringing with him the fires and the poison rain and the skies that were still lit up with that sick color that had no earthly name. All of that, yes, and the Eaters.

There had been other names for them in the beginning, back when people thought they knew what the Eaters were, back when people thought they could be stopped with something as simple as a bullet to the brain. No. This was Azrael’s world and nothing died save by his word of release. You could break them, burn them, or just wait them out until they had rotted away to bones and could no longer come after you, but even then, whatever remained of them still retained some kind of horrible life. Lan could remember her mother pulling the teeth from a charred skull after a neighbor’s death and showing them to her, how the teeth had trembled in her mother’s hand, trying to come together and bite. There was no hope then, only the diminishing living, the growing ranks of the dead, and less and less unpoisoned land to share between them.

Surrender was inevitable, no matter how bitterly Lan’s mother spoke of it now, but surrender had not ended the war. Azrael had accepted the leaders of that broken world for his unending retribution, but he did not forgive the people who gave them up. In the years since his ascension, Azrael had harrowed his great army to a whisper of its former magnitude, but even a handful of Revenants was enough to wipe out whole villages when all they had to do was break down one wall, let the Eaters in, and wait. Everything else they did—the burning, the dismemberments, the impaling poles—served purely as a warning of the fate that awaited all those who took such unwise pride in defiance.

And really, what did Azrael have to fear from them? The world which had once groaned under Man’s weight was quiet now. Cities made to harbor millions had been empty for decades, fallen in and grown over. The last dams had long since burst, the last bridges collapsed. Deer grazed on the old roads, Revenants patrolled the new ones, and folk mostly stayed home these days. So long as they did, Azrael seemed content to tolerate the living even here, provided they stayed well away from his city, his Haven, the land of the beautiful dead.

She was close now, so close. This fool’s journey, begun when Lan walked away from her mother’s smoky pyre two months ago, was now only a day from over, if only she could find someone to finish it for her.

Lan dragged her eyes open without any conscious memory of closing them. She was falling asleep and sleep was never safe in a strange town. She got up and dragged her mattress over to the cell door, propping it against the sliding panel so that she could not help but be jostled awake should someone try to come in with her in the night. Then she lay down, pillowing her head on her lumpy, uncomfortable rucksack, and went to sleep.

* * *

Sometime in the middle of that dark, dreamless night, a hand slipped through the bars of Lan’s cell to grip her foot. It was lifted, tersely shaken, dropped. Lan bolted upright, snatching her knife from its concealed holster on her back, but did not slash. She could see only a shadow among shadows in the moonlit cell, but the shadow wasn’t attacking. It appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat and there were glints here and there that might be a metal buckle, an ammo belt, a gun.

“You Lan?” the shadow said. The voice was a man’s, much older than she’d expected. Ferrying was a kid’s game, and a reckless, nihilistic kid at that. Everyone who’d ferried her this far had been her own age or younger. Here was a man who maybe used to live in a city, the way the cities used to be, all lit up and full of people. Maybe he’d had a job. Maybe he’d had a family.

“I’m Lan,” she said warily. “Did they tell you where I want to go?”

“They said you could pay.”

She unzipped her rucksack and showed him two quart-bottles of peaches. “This year’s,” she told him. “From Norwood.”

He took one and tested the seal, but even though she couldn’t make out his eyes, she had the feeling he was still looking at her. “What else?”

“That’s what you get to take me there.” Lan took the peaches back and zipped them up. “But you can have this and everything in it if you get me over the wall.”

She expected an argument, a laugh at the very least. Instead, as if he didn’t care at all, he said, “As soon as you’re ready, we can go.”

Lan blinked. “Really?”

The shadow turned around and started walking away. “Van’s charged up. Light don’t bother them and the dark don’t bother me. Let’s go.”

Lan scrambled up, struggling to find the door before remembering she’d pushed the mattress against it. She followed the ferryman in the dark, running after him even though he never seemed to walk any faster, catching up only when he reached his plain, unpainted van. The other ferrymen, sleeping in their vans, watched them go. Lan could see Jakes shaking his head, laughing at her as he put himself back to bed.

Once they were on the road, she got her first good look at him. Unnerving, was her first impression. Too handsome. Not as old as she’d thought in the hostel. Her mother’s age, maybe a little older, but he mostly wore it in his eyes. His skin was smooth, unlined. He had no beard, not even the shadow of one. His one flaw was a slash across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek. He’d cleaned it and sewn it shut (he’d cleaned it very well; it wasn’t even a little bit red or swollen. In the dim light, it was more like a painted line than a real wound), but it hadn’t yet begun to heal.

The ferryman caught her staring. He pointed at a book of CDs and gruffly invited her to pick one. Lan thumbed through the plastic pages and chose one at random. She didn’t like the music that played out through the ferry’s speakers. It was too strange, too full of complicated notes made by instruments no one could make anymore. On impulse, she asked him what the world was like before Azrael.

“I don’t remember,” he told her and after that, he did not speak.

They drove through the remains of the night and most of the next day, stopping a few hours before dusk at a waystation so close to her final destination that the clouds on the horizon were actually orange, reflecting the electric lights that lit its streets. Eaters milled stupidly around the fence, tearing themselves on razor wire and occasionally chewing at one another’s wounds if they were fresh enough. There were a couple of teenaged boys by the gate, smoking and shooting flares at the dry ones, and after the ferryman finished running over the Eaters to clear the gate, they let them in.

There was only one other van parked at the station, so there were plenty of charging ports open. There was also a greasy-looking diner that promised beds and hot food. Just what they might be serving, Lan didn’t know. Most waystations were built around small orchards or pens of goats or pigs. There was nothing here, nothing but the scorched black rubble of the wastes.

The boys seemed to know the ferryman, although they didn’t call him by name. Lan waited, watching the Eaters pick themselves up if they could and writhe around if they couldn’t while the ferryman got out and plugged the van’s batteries into a charger. When he came back, he asked her if she wanted something to eat. She said she did and he climbed into the back of the van onto the threadbare mattress there and looked at her.

“I’m not clean,” she lied, joining him. A girl alone learned a lot of lies.

He told her it didn’t matter, to do what she could, and then in a wistful tone at odds with his expressionless face, he told her to get naked when she did it. He wanted to look at her, he said. And that was fine. Lan undressed and used her hand while the ferryman felt up whatever he wanted to feel. He was cool in her palm, slow to respond. Too slow. Too cool. Curious, she put her mouth on him.

He didn’t taste dead, she thought uncertainly. Not that she’d know what death tasted like. Rotten meat, she’d assume. But he didn’t taste alive, that was for sure. He didn’t taste like sweat or musk or piss or man. He tasted…like licking leather. Old leather, too smooth for its age. So now she guessed she knew what a dead man tasted like.

She worked at it for a long time, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. The ferryman stared at the roof of his van and rested his hand on her hair and didn’t speak. His penis warmed up gradually, but never got hard. After a while, he said, “That’s enough,” and moved her gently back. He zipped himself up and watched her get dressed. “Could you tell?” he asked at last.

“Not until I touched you,” she answered honestly.

He nodded and opened up the van’s rear doors. “I guess you could say something if you wanted to,” he said as she climbed out.

“I’d rather get something to eat.”

He nodded again and shut the door behind her.

They went into the diner, past another group of kids, younger ones, racings rats in a crudely-constructed arena. The kids were all shouting, cheering, shaking their guns in the air, apparently oblivious to Lan and the ferryman. Lan would be very surprised if she didn’t find their grubby little handprints on the inside of the van when they came back to it, but if the ferryman was concerned about robbery, he didn’t show it.

There were only three patrons inside the diner—another ferryman, a young one, and his fares, either sisters or mother and daughter, sitting close together. The younger was whisper-arguing at the older one; the older one stayed quiet, but looked like she’d been crying. Their ferryman sized Lan up with an intent interest she did not trust.

“Tell me to touch you, okay?” she murmured as they sat down at a sagging table.

He didn’t answer, but took her wrist and put it firmly over his crotch. She made a point of looking unhappy about it, resigned but a little fearful, as if he were dangerous. Of course he was dangerous. He was one of them—not an Eater maybe, but still one of the dead. And this was more his world now than hers.

Soon, a girl came to their table. Not far into her adolescence, her body was taut and agreeably displayed, but her eyes were already old and tired. “We got coffee, whiskey, applejack and water. Goldslip only. No barter and none of that paper play-money.”

“Clean water?” the ferryman pressed. You had to ask. They didn’t always tell the truth, but if you didn’t at least ask, they’d screw you over any way they could.

The girl rolled one round shoulder in an angry shrug. “Boiled.”

“Coffee, then. Two. And dinners. How much are you?” Like questioning the water, he was expected to ask.

“Five for a suck. Fucks are twenty in a bed, ten against the wall,” she said, turning to flash her fingers at the man working the kitchen. Her father, he would be. Or her brother. Or both. Waystations were always a family business and those families got tight. “Ass only.”

“You a virgin?”

“What I am is a girl who don’t want another brat underfoot. Ass only. You don’t like it, use your hand.”

The ferryman pretended to consider while Lan massaged at his soft groin. “Maybe next time,” he said at last.

“Heart-breaker,” the girl sneered and went to see if the next table needed anything.

A different girl brought their food. Same face, younger model, with light curious eyes. For now, the ferrymen and their travels were exciting, but Lan thought that might change once her breasts budded.

The coffee was hot, but watery and bitter. Made with roasted roots, she guessed, and made damned sparingly at that. The dinner was hard bread and stew, also bitter and watery. The ferryman pushed it around some, watching the room. When Lan finished off her bowl, he slid his over. She ate it too, nasty stuff that it was, knowing it could be days before she ate again, knowing also that this might be her last meal.

The ferryman at the next table haggled the waitress into a crib, and as soon as they had disappeared upstairs, his two fares got up and came over to Lan’s table. “We’re going to Eastport,” the older one said.

“Headed the wrong way.”

“We’ll ride along until you turn around.”

“Then you’ll pay. No free riders.”

The younger girl reached into her jacket pocket and came out with a little brown bottle half-filled with powdery white pills. “Penicillin,” she said. “Thirty doses. Thirty more if we leave right now.”

Lan’s ferryman glanced at the stairs, where the muted sounds of the other man’s enthusiasm could be heard, and then at the window, where the charging light over his van had turned green. He fished out a few slips of hammered gold—the coin of Azrael’s realm—and tossed them on the table. “Come on then.”

The kids were back at the rat races when they stepped outside, pretending they had never left. The ferryman pretended to believe them as he passed by. Then he darted out with unexpected speed and caught one. Between the blinking of Lan’s eyes, he had a knife in his hand and then put the knife in the kid’s shoulder. The other kids scattered back with the first silvery scream, but didn’t run. They watched with cagey eyes as their captive friend squirmed and bled. “Put it back,” the ferryman said calmly, twisting the knife. “Put it all back.”

Little hands dug into pockets. Little feet shuffled out to the van and back. The ferryman dragged his hostage over to witness the returns and, apparently satisfied, pulled the knife out and gave the kid a shove toward the building just as the door banged open. The other ferryman came running out, belt and shirt hanging open, bellowing curses.

“Get in,” the ferryman said, watching the other man charge toward him.

The two women scrambled into the back of the van, but Lan lingered, one foot up on the runner, to watch.

The other ferryman had a knife of his own. Lan’s ferryman put his away. At the last instant, the other man leaped and slammed into his unmoving opponent. Lan saw six inches of steel punch down into the ferryman’s chest. Then she saw him reach, as quick and easy as he’d caught the kid, and twist the other man’s head around. The sound of his neck breaking was a loud pop over a low crunch. The ferryman removed the knife and folded it away. He rummaged through the body’s pockets, took whatever there was to find, and left the rest to the owner of the charging station. The kids were already at the ferryman’s truck, squabbling over pillage.

“Get in,” the ferryman said again, walking around to the driver’s door. There was a small hole in his shirt. There was no blood.

Lan got in the van.

* * *

The women rode in back and, stretched out on the mattress in the curtained dark, were soon both asleep. Lan and the ferryman rode in silence through the night and as the sun pushed up into a grey morning, the walls of Azrael’s kingdom were visible.

“Get in back,” the ferryman said. “Lie down. Whatever happens, stay asleep.” He raised his voice slightly. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” the older woman said. She kept her eyes shut although her arms tightened around the younger woman, who reached up, shivering, to clutch her sister/mother’s hands. “We’re not really going in, are we? We’re just going past, right?”

The ferryman chose not to answer. Instead, he said simply, “They’ll stop me and they’ll want a look at you. Remember what I said: Stay asleep, no matter what they do. I won’t protect you if you panic.”

Lan lay down crosswise on the mattress, her face close to the women’s feet, smelling old shoes and the dungy mud of the last waystation. She closed her eyes and listened to the road hum beneath the van’s tires, willing her body to relax. The younger woman sniffled for a few minutes, but only a few. Then they were quiet, all three, and still.

The van began to slow. She felt it turn and slow again. Someone outside called out to them. The van stopped moving. The engine died. The ferryman rolled down the window.

“Unlock your doors. By order of our lord, all vehicles are to be searched before entry.”

“I’m familiar with our lord’s laws,” the ferryman replied. The van’s locks disengaged. “Very familiar.”

The van’s rear doors opened. Lan felt the chill air of the outside world, rank with rot and rain. She did not move, not even when the hand gripped her face and turned her into the wind. His touch was cool and dry, unfeeling, like being touched by a glove.

“Your hands had better be clean,” the ferryman remarked.

“Exit the vehicle. Do not resist.”

“It would be unwise to delay me,” the ferryman said, not moving.

“You will not be delayed,” came the reply, with a strong note of contempt underscoring the words. “You will be arrested and, if you are very fortunate, executed. Traffic of the living is forbidden.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” the ferryman asked. It sounded as if he might be smiling.  Lan felt the van rock slightly as he leaned over, opened a compartment, held something up. “Do you recognize this seal?”

A thin tinkling sound.

“The seal of Lord Solveig,” someone said stiffly. “But it is the law of Azrael I enforce.”

“Do as you must,” replied the ferryman with convincing indifference, “but do not expect to be rewarded. Do you honestly think Lord Solveig entertains himself without his father’s knowledge?”

The wind slipped over Lan’s face, down her neck, under the open collar of her loose shirt. Her nipples felt as hard as rocks. They ached.

The hand released her. The doors shut.

“A wise decision,” the ferryman said. “So wise, I’m sure I don’t even have to tell you not to speak of me or my cargo. Traffic of the living is forbidden, after all. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone.”

There was no reply. The van’s engine started. The ferryman rolled the window up, muting the heavy clank and groan as unseen gates were opened. They started moving again.

“Where did you get a fake seal for one of the Children?” Lan asked quietly, still lying down, still with her eyes shut tight.

“It isn’t fake.”

“And you bring him girls?”

“Girls and boys.” The van made a turn. “He’s not particular.”

He took her all the way to the palace, through another gate and past another set of guards, into the enclosing dark of a garage. The ferry slowed and turned again, angling downward, creeping deeper and deeper under the earth, until finally, away from the ever-watchful eyes of the dead, he stopped and let her out.

She’d never been underground before. She didn’t like it—that feeling of removal and enclosure. She couldn’t see the city, but its weight pressed down on her from the very low ceiling. There were lamps strung up along the walls, but they weren’t lit. If not for the headlamps on the ferry, the darkness would have been absolute, as heavy as the unseen city. Every sound echoed large. It smelled of wet brick and rats.

The ferryman waited for her to orient herself, as little as she could in this featureless grave, then pointed into the darkness. Shading her eyes from the glare of the headlamps, she could just make out the slightly lighter color of an otherwise invisible door. “It isn’t locked,” he told her. And told her and told her, as his low voice rolled away and rolled back. “The guards have orders not to watch that hall too closely, but the Children might, particularly Solveig once he hears a delivery came through the wall for him. They’re supposed to take meals with their father, but they can be…defiant.”

“Are there Revenants?” she asked, stretching the road out of her stiff limbs.

“Revenants. Pikemen. Watchers. Even the servants are his guardians at need.”

“How many are there?”

“How many are the dead?” he countered.

He took her rucksack and watched as she adjusted the fit of her knife’s holster under her shirt. He asked her no questions. He showed no interest of any kind. His eyes were as dead as only their eyes could be.

“What’s your name?” she asked. She didn’t know why, really. She just felt like she ought to say something.

The ferryman said, “He never gave me one,” and got back in the van. The engine was a roar, deafening in the close air. Above the red glow of tail-lights, Lan thought she saw the pale face of one of the women looking out, but it could have just as easily been her imagination. She’d had a vivid imagination as a child, although she’d mostly grown out of it. She could remember lying on the camp bed with her mother in the Women’s Lodge in Norwood, staring up into the night and making herself see pictures on that black canvas—ladies in tall towers, men disguised as monsters, monsters as men.

She was not a child anymore.

Lan groped her way to the wall and felt along until she found the door. It was not locked, as promised. The space on the other side was not lit, but it smelled better than the garage and she guessed that was as good a reason as any to go inside. So she did.

CHAPTER TWO

It had been impossible to make a plan for this part, in as much as it had been possible to make a plan for any of it, and so she simply walked until she found another unlocked door. It opened into a wide corridor, well lit and more sumptuous than any she had ever seen. The floor was made of wood planks, but polished to a dark amber glow and set so smoothly into one another that it was more like glass than any wood Lan knew. The walls might have been plaster, but there were no cracks or patches, no stains, no degradation of any kind. The smell was fresh and clean, two words Lan knew mostly by reputation. Even the lamps were all working, electric bulbs behind clean glass covers, some of them dripping crystals or set in elaborate holders. The rugs that softened the floor at regular intervals all had perfect edges, deep colors and soft fibers. Everything was decorated, even the hinges on the doors and the plates around the light switches.

Lan wandered, turning where she felt like turning, lingering at every open door to gaze at the riches of each dark, luxurious room. She was in no hurry. There were a thousand winding halls, a hundred echoing stairs, but in the king’s realm, all ways surely led to the throne. It was a pleasant walk, which was the one thing Lan had not anticipated—that she could ever feel wonder as she walked here, that she could ever feel envy. There was so much to see here, so many fine things. After a while, they all seemed to blend together, but Lan had to stop when she saw a familiar face.

A painted face. A portrait. It hung on the wall in a wide place, more a foyer than a hall. Its frame was heavily carved and brushed with gold. Its subject was a woman, her head and upper body anyway. An older woman, her hair like iron and her eyes like steel. Her mouth was smiling, even if nothing else about her was.

It was not quite the same picture that hung on the wall in the sheriff’s office in Norwood, but it was definitely the same woman. Lan had never heard her name, only that she used to be the queen, before Azrael’s ascension. “God save the queen,” Sheriff Neville would say each time he brought out a bottle of the twins’ finest for a quick nip, to which one of his deputies would invariably reply that God hadn’t, God had brought Azrael. So, “God save Azrael,” the sheriff would say and all of them would laugh. When Lan was ten or twelve, an old newssheet picture of Azrael had found its way into a frame and been hung beside the queen’s, but of course, he’d been masked. And now Lan wondered…were there any portraits of him in these halls? And why had he left this one, come to think of it? Why would he, or any conqueror, want reminders of the previous rule?

Distantly, she heard heavy footsteps and although there were numerous doors and cross-halls she might have darted down, she was not here to hide. Lan waited, her heart pounding in spite of her slow, even breaths, and soon enough, two guards marched out of one hall and into hers.

They halted, not quite in unison, and stared at her. They weren’t Revenants, or at least, they weren’t wearing the same uniform as the Revenants in pictures Lan had seen. Similar, maybe, but not the same. Not quite the bog-standard, but much plainer. Both were men and very attractive, although their features were pretty rather than soldierly. Regardless, the pikes they carried and the swords on their belts were shiny and sharp and by no means ornamental.

“I’ve come to see Azrael,” said Lan.

The two guards eyed one another with obvious uncertainty, a hesitation she was sure they would not have had if they’d caught her running through these fine halls or attempting to hide in these beautiful rooms. Lan decided to press the advantage as if it really was one.

She stepped forward, lifting her chin in what she hoped was a confident manner. “Take me to him immediately.”

The guards exchanged a second lingering glance.

“If you can’t take me to Azrael, find someone who can,” Lan ordered, adding in a kind of reckless inspiration, “I’m late.”

That was what seemed to finally decide them. Being late to see Azrael implied he was expecting her and really, how else could she have entered the city and penetrated so far into the royal palace without his permission?              The guards conferred another minute or so, but Lan already knew, miraculously, she’d won. Soon she was walking again, with a guard at either side, leading her in grimly pretty-faced silence deeper into the palace.

They passed through rooms as large as some houses Lan had lived in, under glittering lights like diamond explosions frozen in the air, past paintings and sculptures and even furniture that could have just as easily been art to Lan’s eyes. She wondered if the whole world used to look like this, before Azrael. She wondered if it could ever go back.

They took her to a tall set of doors, but there stopped, muttering at each other in an air of uncertainty while Lan waited a short ways behind them. Before they came to any decision, however, the doors swung open.

Standing on the other side with a few of her courtiers was Lady Batuuli. Lan knew her at once, without effort. The royal family were the only celebrities left in the world. Her picture did not hang on the wall in the sheriff’s office, but there were plenty of them in the old newssheets and magazines the sheriff kept, and when Lan’s mother was in the other room, paying their month’s rent, little Lan would sit and look at all those old papers. Yes, she knew Batuuli.

Where the guards and courtiers were all pretty in death, Lady Batuuli was beautiful. She dressed in white, which stood out magnificently against her dark skin, draping a flawless figure in some kind of goddessy gauze designed to make a man wonder what lay beneath. Her face, dark porcelain, might have been truly breath-taking if not for her eyes, which shone out of her perfection like chips of crystallized hate. They did not look at Lan as much as impale her. When she finished seeing whatever ugly thing she saw in Lan, Lady Batuuli turned that same stare on her guards. “Explain this.”

“Lord Azrael summoned her,” one guard said, which he no doubt thought a safe presumption, one Lan did not correct.

Lady Batuuli sneered (even that, she could not help but do with grace) and turned away, beckoning contemptuously and in silence for them to follow. Her courtiers echoed both the sneer and the retreat. Lan trailed after them with her guards toward the golden light and distant music of the royal dining hall.

Here, the corridors were lined with heavy curtains, works of art, and a hundred armed guards. When they came to a set of heavy, carved doors trimmed in gold and guarded by dozens of paired pikemen, a wave of Lady Batuuli’s elegant hand was all it took to admit them.

The music she’d heard from the hall now swelled the air, played by the dead on an elevated stage in the center of this huge room. Mostly dead, she amended privately; the woman with the flute might be alive, although she was pretty enough to be dead. She tried to get a better look, but her eyes couldn’t seem to focus. There was just so much to see and it was all so clean and sparkly and fancied up that none of it looked real. The light was too bright. The colors, too garish. Two rows of tables ran down the length of the hall, leaving a wide aisle between them, wide enough that the whole of Norwood’s common lodge could have fit in it. Likewise, the dead men and women seated there were pressed together, elbow-to-elbow, but only along the outer side, like dolls laid out for an appraising eye.

Like dolls. An idle thought, but a fitting one. They were dressed like dolls, immaculately made up and trimmed out. Most wore uniforms of some sort, men and women both, many of them still proudly displaying the medals awarded them by armies and governments that did not, for all intents and purposes, exist. With few exceptions, they were neither young nor attractive, facts emphasized rather than disguised by the elaborate care that had gone into preserving them.

This was Haven’s infamous dead court. It was said they had been the leaders of the last rebellion in the final days of Azrael’s ascension, the faces and voices of a people who had sworn they would never surrender. Once, they had stood in ruins and made speeches about the sanctity of British soil and a human spirit that would never die. Now they were here, laughing at jokes no one was telling and eating food they no longer needed…

The food.

Suddenly, it was everywhere Lan looked, more food than all of Norwood could eat in a year. Whole roasted birds decorated with gold-dusted feathers. Long platters where cooked eels ‘swam’ in sauce. Pies baked in the shape of the animals whose meat stuffed them. Hot soups and cold ones. Glazed onions and stuffed mushrooms and buttered carrots and for what? For who? Even the Eaters had only been made to feel hunger, not succumb to it. None of the dead needed to eat and yet, here they were, eating it. Was there another room just as grand elsewhere in the palace where they could go to sick up their fine dinners? Could the dead even be sick or did they have to stick a hose down their gullets and suck it up mechanically? What if they ate too much? If a dead man accidentally burst his bowels, was that a medical emergency or was it just rude?

She knew she was staring, and at first, she thought they were looking at her too, but quickly realized their averted eyes and little nods were for Batuuli, who did not acknowledge them in the slightest. And when she had swept past, they merely returned to their conversations and their unnecessary meals. Now and then, a dead eye might linger, but only as an idle curiosity, the same as if Lan were a dog that had nosed the door open and come slinking in. She ought not to be here, was the unspoken consensus, but one did not scold dogs when at another man’s table, even muddy strays.

Once upon a time, Lan would have been the reason these same people claimed the fight was so important. Now she was a dog in the dining room and they were Azrael’s court.

Batuuli’s long strides had not slowed. Lan followed her around the stage—the flute-player’s hanging sleeve brushed at Lan’s cheek like a spiderweb—and there he was, alone at the imperial table upon a raised dais. Azrael himself.

He did not deign to notice her yet. All his attention remained fixed on the musicians. This gave her the chance to stare at him, but the room was so big and there was still so much space between them that she could see nothing but what she’d seen already in pictures: the figure of a man, a god of men, his body carved to appear at once gaunt and grotesquely muscled. He wore few coverings and most of these were plunder—a collar made of slabs of gold resting heavily over his broad chest, a jeweled band high on one arm, a plated belt and long, many-layered loincloth weighted with gold rings. And the mask, of course. In all the pictures she’d ever seen, he was masked, usually the golden one with horns he’d worn during his ascension (he was wearing that one in the picture that hung on the sheriff’s wall), but today, his mask was made of stone and largely featureless—a smooth darkish oval with sockets for eyes, a bump of a nose, a lipless suggestion of a mouth. If anyone had ever seen the true face of Azrael, Lan had never heard about it.

She was not aware that she had somehow stopped walking until Batuuli came back for her, rousing her from her fascination by snapping her fingers before Lan’s face. She startled, one hand instinctively drawing back in a fist while the other twitched back, reaching for the knife under her shirt before she remembered herself. “Sorry,” she said, but Batuuli had already turned and was walking away.

Although her thoughtless gesture was not worthy of Batuuli’s attention, it had certainly drawn other eyes. Not Azrael’s, his never left the stage, but Lord Solveig raised a hand to silence the chatter at his table and smiled at her.

She knew him at once, as she’d known Batuuli. She had seen him many times, in the pages of magazines, before folk stopped printing them. He had been at Azrael’s right hand when his army had walked out of the Channel that winter’s day and first set foot on British soil; she had seen him with his clothes hanging damp and his hair slicked and dripping, puking his lungs empty as he pulled himself from the water. She had seen him on the streets of Haven, before it was Haven, on a mountain of rubble that used to be homes, stabbing a bayonet into some dark nook where a tiny arm reached blindly out for light. She had seen him on the day Azrael took the palace, years before she was even born, and he looked just the same.

Now he sat in a high-backed chair with one leg thrown carelessly over its gilded arm, surrounded by dead men and women as beautiful as he, eating food he didn’t need and drinking wine instead of boiled water, smiling at her, but he said nothing. He looked at his father and waited.

His was one of only three tables that lined the eastern wall, larger and more elaborately appointed than those they faced, which were themselves noticeably richer than those in the southern end of the hall. Odd that his Children should be seated here and not with him at the imperial table, where there was more than enough room, but then, where would their retinue sit? There were eight at Lord Solveig’s table and twelve at Batuuli’s, which table Lan identified not only by the empty chair at its center, but by Batuuli’s handmaidens taking up position behind it, making up a backdrop of lithesome bodies and filmy white tunics.

The last of Azrael’s three Children sat alone, neither pretending to eat the food nor enjoy the music. Lady Tehya had no companions to fill the empty chairs around her, although she had handmaidens of a sort—a half-dozen dead children painted white to look like statues. Like her father, she went masked, although hers was painted to look like a fine doll’s: bone white, with dark lining around the eyes, a perfect heart of a mouth, and two startling pink circles for cheeks. She raised her head as Lan walked by, and as their eyes met, Lady Tehya reached up and removed her porcelain mask; the face beneath was painted just the same, but cracked all over. And then she realized it wasn’t paint. Tehya’s face…was broken. Her skin, smooth and white and clean, had been shattered the same as one of the mayor’s fine plates and mended again, just like a plate, with glue.

Lan was not aware of shying away until she bumped the arm of her guard. The dead man gave her a shove to put her back in line, so that she stumbled hard against her other guard, who also shoved her. Down she went on her hands and knees, but she’d hardly hit the floor before she was hauled roughly up, not quite to her feet, so that she couldn’t walk at all but had to be dragged.

Lady Batuuli reached the end of the aisle and went to her empty chair, ignoring her father, who ignored her. Lan’s guards continued on another few steps before they finally set Lan on her feet, only to knock them out from under her. One of them put a hand on the back of her neck, forcing her to bow as she knelt on her throbbing knees. Lan peeked up through her hair as best she could, trying hard not to resist, but Azrael paid her no attention. From behind the sockets of his mask, white light glowed; if that was his gaze, it remained fixed on the orchestra. The clawed finger of one hand tapped time as he listened to the music, acknowledging neither his fidgeting guards nor the living Lan between them. Now and then, he used a knife and fork to cut a bite from one of the many platters orbiting the golden-roasted pig’s head dominating the imperial table.

The musicians played on and on. Slow and plunky, not Lan’s style. The flute in particular hit on her ear like a tiny barbed hammer, although she didn’t think that was the player’s fault. She appeared quite absorbed in her playing, not at all nervous and certainly not unskilled. Lan just didn’t care for the tune. Which was fine. They weren’t performing for her.

At length, Azrael’s attention began to wander. Toward Lady Batuuli first, who ignored him, then to the pikemen flanking Lan, and finally to Lan herself. He raised one hand, palm up, and crooked a claw in silence. Four hands closed on Lan at once, pulling her up and jostling her between them in a circle so that she was fully displayed to their lord’s inspection. Azrael sipped at his wine while his unblinking gaze moved, point by point, all the way down to her shoes and all the way back up to her hair. The voice that at last rolled out was, like his hands, cracked and grey and edged in points. “Who is this?”

Freed at last to notice her, nearly every head at every table turned. The musicians played on.

The guard on Lan’s left bowed low. “The human you requested, lord.”

“Oh?” Azrael took up his golden cup and scraped a thumbclaw along the rim. “How odd that I do not recall making such a request.”

“I’ve come to—” Lan began, but had to stop there when he held up a silencing hand.

“Where did you find our guest?”

“In the west hall, my lord,” the guard answered, now distinctly nervous.

“The west hall…of the palace?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Lord Azrael,” said Lan. “I’ve come a long way to—”

“And you brought her…here?” Azrael leaned forward with a narrowed gaze and just a hint of humor about his mouth. “Have I offended you in some fashion? Are you unhappy with my rule?”

“My lord?”

Two more guardsmen were coming toward them, silent in the few shadows of this luxuriant room, stalking Lan’s escorts like hungry cats.

“I have given you the gift of this enduring life and the honor of serving me, and you have never given me cause to regret that decision, yet when you find an assassin in my home and you elect to bring her within killing distance of her target, that can only be an act of incompetence or betrayal. Which is it?”

“I’m not an assassin.”

“Be silent or be silenced,” Azrael said, never taking his eyes off her guards. “You were not raised for this duty. I understand that you may not have the aptitude for it. And that…that is my failing. But you have served me well until now. I am disposed to be lenient. What punishment, therefore, seems fitting to you?”

The two dead men, now with guards of their own at their backs, could only stand in the glow of those eyes. One of them thought to say, “Forgive us, lord,” but the other merely bent his neck and closed his eyes.

“Forgive? No. Offenses—” His eyes moved to Lady Batuuli. “—must be addressed. Would you not agree, daughter?”

“What matter my opinion?”

“Did they not come in your company?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps they came at my command, is that what you think?” Batuuli breathed out a cool laugh and tasted her wine. “I cannot walk in the arboretum without earning your rebuke, yet you think I can hire out for assassins at will?”

“I’m not—”

Azrael pointed at her without taking his eyes from his daughter. Lan shut her mouth and calmed her rising frustration with deep breaths.

“I found them in the hall,” Batuuli said. “I know no more of their circumstance than you, but this I can say, since you ask. However murderous the girl may or may not be, the fact that she has been allowed to come before you at all, unchallenged, unsearched, can only mean someone in this room wishes you dead.”

Azrael studied her with less emotion than showed on his stone mask. “A foolish wish. Yet someone might easily repent of it.”

Lady Batuuli laughed and tossed her elaborate braids. “Oh Father! I say again, this is not my doing. I would never send an assassin against you, surely you know that!” She took another small sip of wine and smiled. “I would much rather kill you myself.”

Lan looked at her, startled.

Azrael merely nodded, unsurprised. “So be it. Take them to the garrison. I’ll be along presently. And you, to your chambers,” he told Batuuli as the dead men were marched away. “There you will stay under watch until you have earned release.”

“Shall I? And here I thought I would be punished.” Lady Batuuli rose, looking over at the table where Lord Solveig sat and watched all this play out with a bored eye. “Will you join me in exile, brother? Unless you’d rather stay and enjoy our dear father’s company.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Solveig said, idly fondling a courtier’s breast while staring too directly at Lan. “I quite like the company tonight.”

Azrael’s eyes sparked brighter through the sockets of his mask. He raised a hand and every pikeman in the room came one step out from the wall.

Solveig looked at each one in turn, then sent a crooked smile up at the imperial table. “Still haven’t forgiven me, eh?”

Azrael waited, his hand motionless in the air, like the sharp points of all those pikes.

“If it’s any consolation, she wasn’t that good.” Solveig pushed his chair back and stood, taking the bottle of wine with him. “I was disappointed, in fact. You’d think a warmblood would be…livelier.”

Batuuli laughed with him and they left together, arm in arm, with their courtiers and servants trailing after. Azrael watched them go, glanced once at Lan, then looked at the last of his Children.

Lady Tehya masked herself again.

“Go, then,” said Azrael, taking up his cup.

Lady Tehya held out her arms like a puppet on strings and let her head tip to an awkward angle. She jittered, then swept up onto her feet and sketched a doll’s bow in the direction of the imperial table. When she straightened again, her arms dropped and suddenly, without moving at all, she was no longer a puppet. She looked at her father without speaking as the rest of the room ate and drank and laughed. Then she turned, beckoning to her statue-children, who all fell into two neat rows behind her and followed her away.

“Now,” said Azrael and turned his eyes at last on Lan. “Speak.”

“Lord Azrael,” she began.

“Am I?”

Again, she stuttered to a stop. “Huh?”

“Am I your lord? I have never been titled by the living. Indeed, when last I spoke with the emissaries of Men, I was told they would never acknowledge nor submit to my right of rule.” His gaze moved over his dead court. Where his eye lingered, dead men and women bowed from their chairs and showed him fawning smiles. “They were wrong, as things turned out. But if the living can bring themselves to at last admit their defeat, I suppose I can be gracious enough to accept their honorifics.” He looked at her again. “Am I now lord over the living as well as the dead? Shall I send my Revenants to hear the oaths of my full people? Shall they ask a tribute in my name? Or yours?”

“I…”

“I am not made foolish by empty praise, nor by titles no Man would honor. Do not insult me so again.” His claw tapped at the side of his cup. “Who are you?”

“Lan.”

Faceless, he nevertheless registered some modicum of interest. “I’ve not heard that one. I shall have to add it to the great book.”

“It’s short for Lanachee.”

“Even better.” He looked her over, dredging a bit of bread through the sauce that had pooled around the pig’s head before slipping it between the stone lips of his mask. Sauce, as thick and red as blood, oozed out through the dry edges of that gruesome wound and trickled down the side of his throat. “Does it have some meaning?”

“It’s where my mother lived as a child. The town or maybe the state, I don’t remember. She came over from America, before they knew it wasn’t just there.”

“How fortuitous. There is little left of that land.”

“There’s little left of any of them.”

A few courtiers murmured at this bold statement, but Azrael himself merely grunted and helped himself to the pig’s right eye. “I left them more than they deserve. You’ve come a long way, you say.” The left eye. “Whence?”

“Norwood.”

A smattering of derisive laughter let her know which of the courtiers knew where that was, but Azrael merely tipped his head. “Distance is relative, I suppose, but that sounds more like a long time than a long distance. How long have you been traveling? Do you know?”

“Two months. If I could—”

“How do you know?”

She blinked at him, flustered. “What do you mean?”

“How do you know it has been two months? I confess, I rather thought time would be among the first of Man’s conceits to be surrendered in the age of my ascension. One day is so much like another. How do you count them?”

He was making fun of her, he had to be…but she couldn’t see the joke and what little she could read of his masked face showed only curiosity. “By the moon,” Lan said at last. “I left Norwood at New Crow Moon and it’s past Full Milk Moon now.”

“Those are farming names.” Azrael eyed her with greater interest. “Do they farm in Norwood?”

“Yes. My mother and I had a small orchard.”

“Of?”

“Peaches. Lord Azrael, if you would—”

“In what state?”

“What?”

“The peaches,” Azrael said patiently as the members of his court snickered and whispered at each other. “In what state of growth did you leave your family orchard?”

“It…Fruiting,” she stammered, utterly nonplussed by this line of questioning. “There’s always some in fruit. We use greenhouses.”

“Ah. Yes, I suppose you’d have to, in this cursed climate. Did you bring any?”

“I…I traded them to the ferrymen.”

“Pity. I had a peach once. I remember it fondly.” He beckoned to a servant. “Fetch Deimos. All the same, two months is a suspiciously long time to travel from Norwood to Haven,” he continued as the servant left. “Did you walk?”

“Part of the way. Please, can I just—”

“How many days would you say you walked?”

Lan gave up with a stifled sigh of frustration and said, “Six. From Norwood to Ashcroft.”

“And afterwards?”

“I took ferries.”

“Ah.” Azrael tore a strip of meat from the boar’s head and dredged it through the sauce pooled on the platter, but didn’t eat it. “So in point of fact, you have neither come a long way nor traveled a long time. You have walked a little, rode a little and mostly waited.”

Laughter swelled again along the tables flanking her. Lan just stood there, feeling heat crawl in her cheeks.

“But never mind. You are here now, however it happened.” Azrael raised a beckoning hand, but not to Lan.

Marching boots behind her. Lan looked back and saw not a pikeman or a palace guard, but a Revenant in full uniform, the mark of the scythe in silver on his chest-piece and his rank indicated somehow in black braids and skull-shaped pips. He did not give her so much as a glance, but went directly to the dais and dropped to one knee beside her. Even at rest, his hand gripped the hilt of his curved sword, as if restless to draw and be about the slaughter for which he and his kind were so widely known and feared.

He was so young, or had been when he’d died. Younger even than Lan, maybe. She looked at him and tried to see someone’s son, someone’s older brother, someone’s sweatheart gone away to war and never returned…but couldn’t. He was a Revenant now, whatever he’d been in life.

“I require a vanguard of Revenants sent to Norwood,” Azrael said, breaking Lan from her sickened fascination. “Bring back peaches.”

“At once, lord,” said the Revenant, bending his neck in a curt bow.

Lan unthinkingly lunged to intercept the Revenant as he marched away, but her way was immediately blocked by crossed pikes. She swung on Azrael next and was forced to her knees before she managed a single step. “Stop it!” she shouted, straining against the pikemen who held her so easily. “You can’t do this! You can’t kill them!”

“I assure you, I can,” said Azrael, not without humor. “Yet my Revenants do not kill without provocation. They go to offer my continued benevolence in exchange for a token showing of submission, no more than can be spared. For this, they shall be reviled and assaulted, and therefore entirely justified in the slaughter to come. Those of Norwood will earn their fates, as do all who stand against me.”

Before reason could shut her mouth, her temper surged and spat out, “Murderer!”

The dead don’t breathe, yet candles guttered all around the room as members of his court gasped, either playing at shock or genuinely gripped by long-buried living instincts. They watched her, tense and silent, all except the musicians, who merely played on. Azrael himself merely huffed out a muted sort of laugh behind his mask and favored her with a tolerant glance. “You have a strange way of seeking favors.”

She blushed, breathing hard, hating herself. After everything she’d done to get here, how could she have made such a mess of it already? In minutes only, she’d betrayed Norwood, insulted Azrael, lost everything.

But he was in no hurry to have her executed, it seemed. At his gesture, the hands at her neck and shoulders released their grip and slowly, Lan stood.

He beckoned.

She did not move.

His head cocked. He beckoned again and when she continued to stand, he let his hand fall and drummed his fingers once on the tabletop. He gazed at her a long time without moving as the rest of his court whispered among themselves and the guards lining the walls shifted and waited for his orders. At last, he said, calmly, “Do not imagine for one moment if you are fearless, if you are defiant, you will win my interest. Every man, and yes, every woman, who comes before me believes they are the first to show me insolence, that I will be somehow charmed by their rebellious spirit. That I will admire their strength and, through that newfound admiration, learn what it is to be human and show mercy.”

He leaned forward over the table, lacing his fingers together and resting his chin atop them. “Do you know the one thing I have never seen a human show me in our first meeting? Hm? Respect. Not the respect of a conquered people for their conquering god, that would be asking a great deal, I think. Merely the respect of one stranger to another, a guest in my house.”

She would not flinch. She would not drop her eyes. She would not back down and most of all, she would not bow. She was Lan of Norwood and she was not afraid.

She said, “It’s not your house.”

The people of his court murmured. Azrael did nothing. Even if he had not been wearing the mask, she doubted his expression would be much changed.

“If it were invalid to claim the lands taken through force, Men would have no homes at all. You,” he said, now seeming to lose interest in her and transfer it instead to his wine. “Where came you by your shoes?”

“What?”

“Your shoes.”

Lan looked at them foolishly, then up at him again. “I bartered for them.”

“From?”

“Posey Goode.”

“And where did she get them?”

The teeth of the trap were suddenly visible. Lan could feel her hands wanting to tighten into fists and had to force them to stay open. “From a ferryman.”

“And where,” Azrael asked calmly, “would he have found them?”

If he thought she wouldn’t answer, just because he was right…

“He got them off a dead man, I reckon,” she said and never dropped her eyes.

Neither did he. “Take them off, then. They aren’t yours.”

Lan did not move.

“So, we are agreed. Possession is law.” He resettled in his throne and took a deep swallow of wine, then smiled at her, broadly and without malice. “You are in my house, child, and I have been a gracious host to an uninvited guest, but my grace is at an end.” Signaling to the guards behind her, he turned his attention back to the musicians. “Nevertheless, your invasion here tonight was as courageous an act as it was impertinent and I have a whim to reward it. You will have an escort to Haven’s borders and safe transport beyond to the destination of your choosing. Within reason.”

The guards took impersonal hold of her arms. Lan kept her gaze fixed on Azrael. “I haven’t had my audience.”

“Neither are you owed one,” Azrael said. “You have seen me and will live to tell the tale once you are safely returned to your land. That is honor enough.”

“I’m not leaving until you’ve heard me.”

The royal guards bristled, their cool fingers digging at her with supernatural strength. Behind her, the orchestra came to the end of their song and began another. Azrael swirled the wine in his cup and said, “Mercy is not lightly offered in this court and should not be lightly spurned.”

Lan lifted her chin. “You have to hear me out.”

“I…have to.” Azrael tapped idly at the rim of his goblet, seemingly unaware of the whispers of the watching courtiers, but plainly very much aware of Lan’s trembling. At length, he stirred and waved one dismissive hand. “Leave us.”

His command had no clear intended recipient; all obeyed. The music halted mid-note as the band gathered their instruments. The waiters stopped serving, put down their platters and ewers, and returned to the kitchen. The dead court withdrew, all their colors and the rustling of their fine clothes making them seem like a flock of birds startled into flight. The door-keeper shut the doors and they were alone.

In the quiet of this empty room, the smallest noise scraped the ear. Lan’s breath, the rustling of her clothes, the pounding of her heart—Azrael heard and judged them all with the same unblinking stare.

At last, he leaned back in his throne; she could hear his body creaking as he moved, the sound of a leather glove drawn into a fist. His hand toyed briefly with his cup and then lifted. Beckoned.

Unsure, she took a step. Just one.

“To me,” he said, with what might have been a small sigh. “I want a better look at you. And you want a better look, I think, at me.”

Did she? Her feet rooted, but her heart raced even faster. Some people said he had no face, that beneath the masks, he was only a broken shell filled with fire. Others said he had the head of a snake or a jackal or a swarm of spiders. Or that he wore human faces nailed onto his own skull—a mask beneath the mask—and that beneath that, there was only darkness. And these were just the whispers in Norwood and at hostels along the road. Who knew how many other thousands of rumors there were across the world? Did she really want to know the truth? Could she know and still say what she’d come here to say?

Lan was not entirely aware just when she started walking. She only knew that somehow she was drifting toward him, pulled in as if by his will alone.

—no true eyes, only a pale glow set in deep sockets, like twin stars in an empty sky—

As she grew nearer, she could see his scars more distinctly and they filled her with a hopeless dread.

—the blackened burn across his left side with stripes of white rib showing through—

Had he ever been a man once?

—the deep slash over his hard stomach that he’d sutured with silver rings, from each of which dangled a polished finger bone or a tooth—

If he had been a man, a live man, he was dead now.

—the many lines carved across his throat, the leavings of countless blades, some of them still open to let dry tendon and bloodless meat peek out from behind tatters of skin—

And if he was dead, why should he care if he killed the world?

She reached the edge of the dais and stopped, staring up at him—Azrael the God, the Conqueror, Azrael Who Is Death—and he leaned forward over his table to look down at her—Lan, who had no more home and who was no one’s daughter. There were only three shallow steps to climb the dais, three more short strides to take her to his table. She could go right to him. She could get close enough to hear his breath, if he breathed. She could touch his hand if she dared and see if it was cold and dead or hot with the hellish fire that burned out of the holes in his mask.

Lan stood where she was, shivering.

He spoke first, in a slow wondering way that did not, for change, seem feigned: “Why, you’re a child.”

“I’m old enough,” Lan insisted at once, before she even stopped to think what she might be insisting upon.

“Hm.” Azrael settled back in his throne, considering her. At length, he raised one hand and swept it outward in an open gesture toward the many tables around her, the gluttonous wealth of his unnecessary feast. “Be seated, child. I see no reason you should not be fed before I decide your fate.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It is not wise to lie in my presence, even in such trivial matters. Those without my borders hunger always. I have seen to it. And even if you had a field of crop and pens groaning with stock, still I would hazard your belly to be too full of nerves to allow for much of a meal before setting out on this endeavor. Share mine.”

“I ate before I came here.”

“Out, then,” he said curtly, shoving back his heavy throne to stand. “I do not waste my time with liars. Guards!”

The doors opened at once. In desperation, Lan said, “I did eat! It was just…a while ago.”

Azrael paused, no more than one long stride from the table. She could feel his eyes on her, cutting deep wherever they rested. “A while.”

“Last night,” she admitted. “At a waystation.”

“Fed from the hand of your ferryman, I suppose.” After a long moment, Azrael returned to his chair. Lan saw the shadows cast by his laconic wave and heard the guards once more retreat and quietly close the doors. “One of mine?”

Lan hesitated, knowing she was too near to being thrown out and that this chance would never come again, but unwilling to betray the man who had brought her into the city.

Her hesitation was answer enough for Azrael. “Did you think I did not know? And who else would have such certainty of passage through my walls that they could sell the privilege? I bear them no ill will,” he said without concern, almost without interest. “They do me no harm. What did your ferryman feed you?”

“Stew.”

“Ah yes. Roots boiled in sweat.”

“It wasn’t that bad.” It hadn’t been much better, though. “There was meat.”

“Hm.” There was so much knowing amusement in that small, wordless sound that he hardly needed to say, “Rat or crow?”

“I don’t know,” Lan said, blushing. “And I don’t care. I’ve eaten worse.”

“So have I,” he replied mildly. “Which is why I prefer to eat better. Come. It may be grotesque to your young eyes, but I assure you, there is nothing more succulent than the cheek of a young boar. You are hungry,” he remarked, watching her stare at the pig’s head that was the centerpiece of the imperial table. The boar’s eyelids had slipped down over the empty sockets, giving it an appearance as if it were only sleeping, but its swinish mouth leered in such a way as to suggest that its dreams were not particularly pleasant. “Are you not?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Yes. And there is nothing so terrible to feel as hunger, even for just one day, two or three wanting meals. It gnaws at you.” He scratched one claw through the thick sauce that pooled over his plate and slipped it into the mouth-slit of his mask to taste. “That is why I reserve it for those who rebel against me. But you are not guilty of that crime. Yet. Therefore, sit. Anywhere you please.”

She told herself she didn’t have a choice, that refusing him again would only get her thrown out. Maybe it was even true, but in the end, it was not the reason Lan fumbled her way to a chair and sat, realizing only after she’d done so that she’d taken Lady Batuuli’s place for her own. Platters of food surrounded her, swallowed her in an orgy of spices: towers of roasted apples studded with cloves and cinnamon spears, fish crusted with pepper, vegetables baked in herbed butter. Choice cuts of boar meat floated in a pool of that dark, glossy sauce, so smooth that she could see the candles reflected there, not only their glowing flames, but their golden holders. She could see her own face staring down, watching, waiting to see if she would eat the Devil’s food just because he sat her at his table.

“So. You enter my home without invitation. You bring no tribute. Now you refuse my hospitality.” Azrael leaned back in his throne, lacing his hands together over his scarred stomach. The silver rings holding his wound mostly closed jingled softly. “Which of these did you imagine would earn you the audience you say you came seeking?”

“I came to talk to you. To ask—”

“Demand.”

Lan stammered to a stop, but he said no more, only continued to watch her. Hesitantly, she began again. “I came to ask—”

“Demand. One who asks does not invade the home of him before whom she supplicates herself. One who asks receives his will with respect and goes meekly upon dismissal. No,” he concluded, sweeping his arm through the air as though her reasons for being here were no more than insects he could brush away. “You have not come here to ask, so make your demands and go.”

Frustration and nerves once more broke her. Before she could stop, she’d snapped, “I won’t talk to you until you listen.”

“Go, then.”

“I’m not leaving until you let me talk.”

“Aha, a conundrum. How to solve it…?” He pretended to consider while she pretended the smell of pork and roasted apples was not clawing up her guts. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers, making her jump. “At the first meeting I had with Men upon my ascension, their minions informed me that a show of faith was necessary to achieve any audience with their leaders. So. Remove your weapon,” he ordered. “Set it here, before me.”

“I’m not armed.”

“I warn you again that I do not tolerate lies in my presence,” he said impatiently, rising from his throne. “Speak another and your time here is ended. Remove your weapon. Set it down.”

Blushing, Lan reached back beneath her shirt to the little knife she kept strapped there. “It’s for defense,” she insisted as he descended the dais. “I’ve had to travel a long way.” He was still coming; she shoved her chair back and jumped up, even though there was nowhere to go, no way she could outrun him. “I wasn’t going to use it on you!”

“No? But by all means, child.” He opened his arms. “You might save the world with one good blow.”

She looked in disbelief at the knife, at a blade no longer and no wider than her forefinger, and at him, this god with ten thousand bloodless scars. “No,” she said. It hardly needed saying, but she said it anyway.

“I insist.”

“No!”

“To ease your mind.” He closed the last distance between them to tower over her. Up close, she could see the twist of his smile through his mask’s mouth-slit. “To prove a point.”

“The only point you want to prove is that none of us are trustworthy!” She threw the knife down on the table. It clattered unimportantly, like a spoon, like a pencil. “That’s not why I’m here! You can’t make it be that way! You can’t use me to prove it!”

“Do not presume to know my mind.” He picked up the knife, tested the ridiculous toy of its edge against his thumb, then touched the point to his breast. “How would you have it, little hero? Here?” The knife moved to his throat, actually inside that terrible open scar to press somewhere unseen amid the muscle and bone. “Or here? Tell me, shall I stab or slash?”

Lan pressed her lips together and said nothing.

“Both have been tried, of course.” Azrael removed the knife from his throat and studied it with amused contempt. “By greater blades than this. I have been cleaved by swords with names as fine and lineages as noble as the men who wielded them. In every bygone age, I have met with heroes who have learned to their loss—” He touched the tip of the blade to his arm and drew it slowly downward. His flesh parted; black blood welled like beads of tar, too thick to fall. “—I do not die.”

“I didn’t come here to kill you.”

“Witness all the same.” He moved the knife back to his chest, glanced at her, then pushed it in as deep as it would go. “I’ve found it saves time.” He released the hilt, gestured to it. “Twist, if you desire.”

She shook her head, her hands in fists.

“So be it.” He pulled the knife out and tossed it into her plate. The blade was smeared black, but he did not bleed. “You cannot wound me. You might open every vein, but you will never bring my life gushing out. My flesh may tear, but it does not burn and does not decay. My bones do not break. The heart you seek to pierce—”

“I do not.”

“—beats in time with this world’s own ageless pulse. It feels no love, no remorse and no mercy, and it will never stop.”

“I’m not here to kill you, damn it!”

“No. Plainly, you have come on a diplomatic mission. One for which you are uniquely unqualified.”

Lan flushed. “I just want to talk!”

“You forget I am familiar with the way humans ‘talk’.” The word was a curse in his mouth, even if he smiled as he said it. “I have been a supplicant to Men. I endured without protest every indignity they inflicted as my ‘show of faith’. I allowed them to bare my body, to fondle it and indeed, to enter it. And when they satisfied themselves that I was utterly unarmed, these men of peace brought out their weapons and emptied them into me. I survived it, as I survive all things, and gave them better deaths than they deserved, I dare say. So this was done and so I went in to the audience I had earned, allowing those men, who had surely given the killing order to their slaves, every opportunity to treat with me honestly. I made my demands—You will note I do not say I asked,” he added with an arch sidelong glance. “With the bodies of their minions strewn about the tent still choked with the smoke from their weapons and dewed with my blood, they gave me every agreement even as they made plans to invade the prison they had not yet set me in and butcher the children they had not yet given me. This is how the living ‘talk’…with smiles and lies.”

Lan shook her head and stared at the wall, clenching her jaws tight together to keep from spitting out something else she knew she’d only regret.

“Have you nothing else to say?”

“You’ve already decided not to listen.”

“One wonders how you could have expected anything else.” He gazed around the empty room, then moved past her and headed for the door. When he opened it, the hall beyond was lined with guardsmen as deep as Lan could see. Azrael gestured toward them. “If your appetite returns in my absence, by all means, stay and eat your fill, child. When you are finished, my men will see you safely to the town of your choosing. I advise you to stay well clear of Norwood.” He turned to the first of his guards. “Food and water for her journey. If she has other requests, inform me.”

“Wait!” She ran after him, but had to stop at the door, where two guards crossed their pikes before her.

Azrael did stop, although he did not turn to look at her. “You are proving an unruly guest,” he warned. “Take care lest you become unwelcome.”

“I’m not going anywhere until we talk!” Lan pushed futilely at a pike, but it was no more yielding than the dead man who held it. In frustration, she slapped at the door itself, making little noise but hurting her hand. “You have to listen!”

“You command me nothing.”

“People are dying! The war is over and you’re still killing us!”

“The war?” Now Azrael turned, head lowered like that of a bull about to charge. “I desired no war. My demands were small. There need never have been any conflict. After my age of solitude, I sought only companionship. Did I demand a tithe of virgins? Did I raid them for their favored firstborn? No! I raised up their unwanted ones, the merest handful, to reside with me in peace. I was content to be imprisoned, content to live with my Children under their watch until the end of Time itself, if that was their pleasure. No one need ever have suffered for it. No one need ever have lain eyes on them or my terrible self again. Yet they defied me. They lured me out for talk and they slaughtered my helpless Children where they stood, too innocent even to know to scream. Now you dare to come before me protesting the war they began, the war they demanded!”

“When is it going to be enough?” she countered. “How many millions of lives equal the few you lost, the few you stole from their families, stole right out of their graves?”

“Enough!” Azrael turned to his guards. “Take her to the meditation garden. Perhaps a night in chains will improve our guest’s manners.”

The guards obeyed at once, each taking one of her arms in a firm grip. Clearly, struggle was expected, but she went with them in spite of their pulling, not because of it. As she passed Azrael, standing in the hall with his arms folded across his scarred chest, she said, “I’m not giving up. I won’t leave. You’ll have to kill me to get rid of me.”

He tsked behind his expressionless mask. “I don’t doubt your conviction, child, yet a worldly traveler such as yourself ought to have been made aware that killing is not what I am known for.”

CHAPTER THREE

As promised, Lan spent the night in chains, affixed to a support in such a manner that she was forced to kneel with her hands behind her back and her head bent. It had hurt for a few hours, but she’d since acclimated some and let the support take her weight, so now she was mostly just stiff. Her legs from the knees down were numb, but although she dreaded having to move and wake them up, she was perfectly aware that her discomforts were petty ones, particularly given her present company.

It was a cold night, but the meditation garden in Azrael’s palace had high walls all around that cut most of the wind and there was a fire burning not far from Lan that kept her fairly warm even during the worst hours. The fire was a man. He had been soaked in some kind of oil before his impalement, so that he burned through the night with low greenish flames that put out columns of greasy smoke. Now, the man was little more than a charred lump with the suggestion of legs, one arm, a node of a head. Lan could hear crackling as he shifted, struggling either to free himself or come after her, but she did not watch him. The stink of burnt flesh blew into her face all night; she thought of her mother and, much as she fought not to, sometimes she cried.

The burning man was only one of three that shared the garden with her. As the sun came up in the bruised sky, she could see them better. One was a scrawny teenager with short hair and a flat chest, most likely a boy. The hands were bound behind his (for the sake of argument) back, frozen into claws. It had been a simple impalement; the spike itself was little more than an accent to the scene—hidden behind the man’s bound legs with no more than a few inches protruding through his broken teeth. It hadn’t been a quick death and it was an even worse way to come back. As an Eater, he wasn’t even aware of the spike that pinned him in place. He only knew that Lan was there, living meat bafflingly out of reach, but a hungry stare and slow writhing was all he could manage and it was easy enough to ignore him.

The third man was the worst. He had been a guard and was still wearing most of his uniform, stripped of his rank and insignia. He had been denied an impalement, but this was not mercy: thick wires pierced him at two or three dozen points, but only to support and bind him; his eyelids had been cut away so that his eyes could be lubricated by the viscous liquid that dripped from the pipework frame to which he was wired. Although he himself was not decayed, his belly had been opened and the pale daylight showed signs of predation. He had made no effort to speak, but now and then, his eyes shifted in their lidless sockets to look at Lan.

The morning lengthened. Lan listened to the burning man crackle and watched the newborn Eater drool around his impaling spike as he stared at her. As the air warmed, enterprising birds fluttered down to perch on the former guard’s belt and peck breakfast out of his entrails. Muted voices drifted down through open windows as the halls of Azrael’s palace began to fill with servants going about their daily routine. As the sky lightened, Lan couldn’t help but think of Norwood and what she would be doing right now, if nothing had changed. Her day would have started with sweeping out the hearth of the women’s lodge for Mother Muggs and filling the woodbin. Then she would have to hurry over to Mayor Fairchild’s house and in through the back door to do the same for them before heading out to the pens to tend their pigs, goats and geese. If Missus was feeling Lady-of-the-Manor, Lan might be given a box-lunch of whatever was left over from the family’s breakfast to eat later, but even if not, Lan could usually steal a bit of cheese or crust of bread in the chaos that was the Fairchilds’ kitchen. Either way, she would be fed by now and hard at work in her own rows in the greenhouse.

She needed to stop thinking about food, because it only made her hungrier. For that matter, she needed to stop thinking about work, because not being able to move around made even those back-breaking chores seem desirable. And she especially needed to stop thinking about home, because she didn’t have one.

So Lan was kneeling there, not thinking, when the garden gates opened. Two Revenants came for her, unlocking the chains from her supporting frame but leaving them attached to her shackles. She couldn’t help screaming a little when they lifted her; her joints, like rusty hinges, screamed along with her.

The Revenants did not wait for her to find her feet, but simply dragged her between them out of the garden. The burning man writhed, reaching the stump of his last arm toward them, hissing out steam that might have been words if he had lips to shape them. The Revenants ignored him. They had come for Lan. They had no other interest.

Through the fine rooms and grand corridors of the palace, they walked and Lan was carried. Eventually, she was able to stop moaning, although she had no strength to walk and was shivering too violently to even try. Her world was pain and crystals and cramps and golden light and tears and the occasional glimpse of beautiful, dead faces.

Gradually, the wide halls narrowed and grew darker. The chandeliers and sconces were replaced by plainer fixtures, more widely spaced along windowless walls. They came to a stair, an empty hall, another stair, and another hall, this one occupied by a dozen pairs or more of pikemen, forming a kind of living, or unliving, corridor that ended in a heavy door banded with iron. Lan closed her eyes and did not open them again until she felt herself dropped. Her chains clanked as they were affixed to some new anchor and then her guards left her.

When she opened her eyes at last, she appeared to be alone. The room was vast, opening into several wide niches, but all were empty and dark under unlit sconces. In fact, although she could see several fixtures, the only light in the room came from a fireplace on the opposite wall. Like the built-in alcoves lining the walls, the fireplace was plainly intended to be decorative, but its ornate mantel was empty and its brass screen had been pushed carelessly aside. No matter, as the flames appeared to be coming from vented pipes and made no sparks; there wasn’t even a fake log to pretend to be burning. The room’s one remarkable feature was a high, glittering fountain that poured water endlessly from several openings into a dark pool partially shielded by joined panels of opaque glass bordered by a wooden lattice. On the other side, tucked away as if to hide them, were Azrael’s many masks, each one on its own featureless wooden block, arranged on a plain slab of a table. As for the rest of the furnishings, there was only an unwieldy wardrobe set in the far corner where it was all but invisible.

So it was his room. It had to be. Hardly what she imagined for the ruler of the world, at least until she looked behind her to see a bed the size of the drying shed back in Norwood. It had a roof and pillars and curtains of its own, like it was a house. Its bedding shimmered in the firelight, all black and gold. She counted ten cushions, all shapes, no two exactly alike. It was a bed the way Azrael’s palace was a house or Haven was a town.

It was a bed…and Lan was chained to it.

Once more, the heavy door opened. It was Azrael. He didn’t look at her as she struggled to rise from her ungainly sprawl, but went to the fountain, peeling away layers of finery as he walked. The flesh beneath caught every shadow and showed every scar. His back had been so torn by ancient whips that the bones of his spine protruded, curiously lustrous against the dull grey color of his skin, more like pearl than ivory. Lan stared, clutching at her forgotten chains, as the true Azrael—Azrael the immortal, Azrael the eternal, Azrael, lord of the beautiful dead—bared himself, but when he turned around to face her, she quickly dropped her eyes.

“Modesty,” Azrael observed. “Tell me, is it a virgin who has come so fearlessly to this dragon’s lair?”

“No.”

“All to the better.” He turned away, unfastening the delicate catches of his mask with a blind deftness that bespoke much practice. As he moved behind the screen, she saw his silhouette take the mask away and set it aside on the table with all the rest of them. He rubbed the face beneath—not a snake’s head or a skull, but not human either—and stepped down into the pool. “I have no use for virgins and no patience for instructing them.”

Lan stared at the tiles between her bent knees and listened as Azrael bathed. She realized she could smell herself—the stink of the streets and her own sweat, unwashed God alone knew how many days. Weeks, for certain. Maybe months. Water was too precious now for anything as frivolous as bathing, but her mother had told her stories of being a small child in a huge white bathtub with water up to her chest, painting herself with bubbles. They used to make toys, she’d said, toys just for playing with in the water.

She stank of smoke. Smoke and charred, dead flesh. For a moment, she almost thought she could smell peach blossoms with it, the way she had smelled them that day…when the fire burned.

“I hear no protest.”

Roused from her memories, Lan did not immediately understand. “What am I supposed to be protesting?”

“My rapacious will.”

“What good would that do?”

“You might be surprised.” Azrael dunked himself entirely under the water, coming up with a huge splash that sent droplets over the screen to fall as far as Lan. They were warm at first, but swiftly cooled. “I am aware that my appearance suggests a brutal embrace, but I take no pleasure in fear or pain. Screams and struggles annoy me. You might easily delay your fate, if not escape it wholly, with well-executed resistance.”

“Screams and struggles annoy me too,” said Lan. “They’re pointless. I’ve never seen an Eater turned back by tears.”

“Yet you’ve turned them with argument, or so I must assume as you bandy words at me.”

“Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved?”

His silhouette stopped moving entirely for a second, maybe two. In a low, brooding tone, he said, “That is the first time anyone has ever suggested I could love.” He turned his back on her and resumed bathing. “You ought to take some pride in that. I don’t stumble on many firsts anymore.”

“I loved my mother,” Lan said. “She was the only thing I had in the whole world that was really mine. And you didn’t just take her away, you turned her into something else. Something that didn’t know me. Something that had to be destroyed.”

“Is this your plan, child? To appeal to my sympathies?” Azrael climbed out of his bath and selected a new mask, the black one in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head. He fastened it on, then walked out from behind the screen to dry himself by the fire, otherwise naked. Lan watched his feet, only his feet. “I can’t say I think much of your chances.”

“If you didn’t want to hear what I have to say, why did you have me brought here?”

“You cannot be so stupid as to think I summoned you to my bed for conversation. Why be coy?” asked Azrael, leaning up against the mantel. “We both know why you came here.”

“I was carried here in chains.”

“You,” he said, pointing a claw at her, “came seeking me in my home. You dangle words such as audience and speak of war and peace, but you brought nothing with which to curry favor and sweeten trade. No, your true intent was that I should see you, find you fair, show you mercy…and where should that end but here? Oh, do not pretend surprise at me. Did you imagine you were the first ever to think of enduring my bed and so raise you out of wretchedness?”

“That isn’t why I came.”

“Mm. I hear no lie in that. Intriguing. I choose to believe you. So,” he said thoughtfully. His fingers tapped at the mantelpiece. “Shall you?”

“Shall I what?”

“Lie down with the Devil.”

She could not quite understand that. She ought to, and a part of her knew she ought to, but she couldn’t. It was like trying to patch together a broken glass in which some of the pieces were from a clay cup. “You mean…” Even the word seemed slightly ridiculous in her mouth. “You mean you want me for your dollygirl?”

“I daresay it’s easier work than farming.”

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

She could only stare. She had imagined every possible outcome of this encounter, every possible death, but not this.

“You seem skeptical. Am I not a man, whatever else I may be? Is it so impossible that I might have a man’s desires?” His gaze moved down over her body. “The Great Jester, in His infinite wisdom, has seen fit to deny me a form that invites seduction, but of negotiation—” He held up one claw, smiling. “—I have both aptitude and resources. Consider that I am in a position to provide you with a far better life than that which you left in Norwood. Certainly now,” he added with low twist of a smile.

“Now that you’ve sent your Revenants, you mean.” She caught that thought and all the grim imaginings that came with it, and used it to anchor her. “Is this how you get all your women? With murder?”

“One baits a hook for the fish one desires. For some, a sparkle. For others, carrion. But for you…” Tap-tap-scraaatch went his claw on the mantel. “If the luxuries of my palace are not enough to lure you, you might do well to think of the horrors that await you in the world outside, should I choose to release you.”

Against her will, Lan’s eyes crawled up Azrael’s legs as far as the relaxed club of his cock. It hung like a dark promise, almost but not quite human in form, twisted out of familiarity. She looked back down at the tiles. “I didn’t come here to escape those horrors. I came to end them.”

“Oh?” Interest sharpened his tone; amusement blunted it. “Is this an assassination after all?”

“No. I came for an audience,” she said stubbornly. “Please. The war is over. You have got to stop killing us.”

His face behind the mask hardened. “I don’t kill anyone.”

“Oh, that is such pigshit! When I set a trap and a rat walks into it, I don’t stand there and say I didn’t kill it. I used a trap, but I killed that rat. You can sit here in Haven and pretend you’re innocent, but you raised those fucking Eaters and they’re killing people, and that means you are killing people!”

Azrael snorted. Through the muzzle of his mask, it came out as more of a growl. “This is how they negotiate in Norwood, is it?”

“Stop making fun of me.”

“No, no, I think I prefer your method to the others I have known. An audience…” He folded his arms, tapping one claw against his bicep, then shrugged and nodded once. “So be it. Who are you?”

Flustered by this easy capitulation, Lan told him her name again.

He stopped with a raised hand, shaking his head. “Who are your people? Not the farmers of Norwood, but the greater sum? Whom do you represent as you kneel in chains to beg my mercy?”

Lan hesitated, then said boldly, “All of them.”

“No, no, truthfully now. The New Earth Alliance? The Republic of Aryan People? The Holy Soldiers of Rome? When I summon your leader to negotiate the terms of your surrender, whom shall I summon?”

Lan said nothing.

Azrael came toward her and bent low to look her over. The eyes she had first seen as pure white, she now saw were full of colors after all, buried beneath the pale glow and difficult to see: greens like swamp water, browns like clay, greys like water-logged flesh. These were death-colors, Lan realized, having believed all her life that death came in midnight blacks and blood reds, but no. Now she saw clearly that blood was life and night was only what there was when the sun went down. Death had its own color and it was the color glowing out of Azrael’s eyes.

He finished his inspection and smiled at her through the teeth of the wolf’s-head mask. “Did you come alone, child?”

Lan refused to look away, but she could feel the burn of a blush in her cheeks. “Someone had to.”

“And it was you. What a splendidly useless gesture. No matter. There will be no negotiations. I have already defeated you. I do not care if you surrender. Enough of this.” He reached out and caught her by the chin, putting their faces very close together. His gaze was hard to meet, not just for their color or the unnatural heat that came from those white fires, but for the hunger she saw there. “Shall you?” he asked quietly. “Say no and the game is done. I’ll not force you. I’ll not starve you or whip you or have you thrown screaming to the mindless dead that scavenge without my walls. I’ll put you in a car and send you home. Say no. Spit.” He shrugged with his chin, his eyes never leaving hers. “I have endured too much offense to be easily offended anymore. All you have to say is no.”

“And if I say yes?”

He inclined his head slightly. “We negotiate.”

“What do I have to do?”

“All that I ask. It will be unpleasant, but you will be well-compensated for your compliance.” His hand opened slowly and just brushed at the line of her jaw. His fingers were rough, rough as stone, but his touch was gentle. “I’ll take nothing you do not give me.”

She could see herself reflected in the dark surface of his mask, distorted, grotesque. Her eyes were bulging sockets. Her mouth, a clownish leer. She couldn’t do this—wouldn’t do this, but what she saw her malformed reflection say was no heated refusal, only a small, stuttering, “I don’t…know if I can.”

He smiled and his smile was horribly sympathetic. “A trial, then.” He straightened and gestured to his groin. “Please me and be rewarded.”

“With what?”

He spread his open hands. “What would you have? And appreciate, if you will, that I could promise you any number of things to win the privilege of your body’s pleasures, but I choose to treat with you honestly.”

She didn’t know what to ask for, so she returned to the one thing she knew that mattered. “A hearing.”

“You have already had it,” he said, with some exasperation.

“A fair hearing.”

“Implying what? That I was less than fair in my assessment of your circumstance?”

“You asked me what I wanted.”

“You try my patience, child, and I warn you, it may be a deep well, but it is not bottomless. If this is not the audience you insist upon—” He caught her chin and pushed her head back, forcing her to look past his thickening cock to the sullen embers of his eyes far above. “—what is it?”

Lan raised her arms in clanking chains. “Captivity.”

“So then. As my prisoner, you think to set the terms of your imprisonment?”

“You can do a lot of things to me,” Lan said, as neutrally as possible, “and I’ll lie there and take most of them, but if you really want this, you’re going to have to give me what I want.”

“How very dramatic.”

“No matter what you do to me, you can’t force me to suck your cock without my permission.”

“I would not force you in any—” Azrael broke off and gazed at her a long time while fire smoldered in the fathoms of his eyes. “You threaten to bite,” he said at last.

“It’s not a threat. A threat is something that might happen. I absolutely will bite if you force your cock into my mouth and I don’t care what you do afterwards. But hear me out, let me at least try to convince you, and I will do whatever you want not only willingly but with enthusiasm.”

“You have been trying to convince me. It has not made you biddable.”

“You’ve been refusing me out of hand and twisting my words around.”

“You forbid me to refute your childish idealism? This is the fair hearing you suggest?”

“You don’t like it? Plumb some other pipe. I’ve only got the one with teeth.”

“Is that a challenge?”

This time, it was Lan who shrugged.

They stared each other down in silence.

Azrael released her and hunkered down, letting his arms rest on his bent knees, his hands dangling and claws flexing between his thighs. “An audience,” he said.

“Yes.”

“To beg my mercy and—finding it, one assumes—end the suffering of your kind.”

“Yes.”

“Fairly and reasonably, I say to you that I did not seek to make Man suffer at my ascension.”

“Okay, so I admit you didn’t start the war. I’ll even go so far as to say the people who provoked you deserved your vengeance, but not the whole world and not forever! Anything you could have called a war has been over for years, but only you can end it.”

“What is it you would call an ending?” he asked with some asperity. “No, do not answer. Hear me.” He paused, thinking, then raised a hand and gestured vaguely where his heart might be, if he had one. He said, “Let us imagine that I possess mercy. Let us imagine further that your fleshly pleasures earn my favor and I am moved to grant your every appeal. Say that I put an end to the creatures you call ‘Eaters’ and recall my Revenants to Haven, there forevermore to dwell apart from the living race of Man. How many days of peace will you guess I am given before the gratitude of your kind brings them once more to my threshold to murder my children? Mm? To murder me?”

Lan did not answer, but didn’t drop her eyes either.

“You speak of ending the horrors of your existence.” Azrael’s mouth twisted behind his mask, making the exposed tendons in his throat creak. “I am one of those horrors. They will not end for your people until I am ended and I can never end. So. Unless you have some fair and reasonable rebuttal, I believe our audience is concluded.” He stood. The thick shaft of his organ hung before her eyes, gnarled with scars even there. “I will now hear negotiation for your personal surrender.”

“Will you unchain me?”

“I can be persuaded.” He gestured to himself.

Lan reached up her hand and touched him. He was surprisingly cool; she’d expected that of dead flesh, like the ferryman who had brought her here, but even compared to him, he was cool. It was not merely the lack of warmth, but as if he actually radiated cold. More than that, there was a strangeness to the feel of him. He was at once too smooth and too twisted. Unnatural. Worse than that. Anti-natural, if that was a word.

He hardened quickly as she stroked him, but even that unnerved her. He was much, much harder than human flesh could be and there was no pulse to be felt just below his thick, scarred skin. When he had risen fully, she licked her mouth for moisture, rose higher on her aching knees, and fastened her lips to his swollen head. He tasted of ashes and bones. She shut her eyes and went to work, grimly wetting the full length of his shaft with long, slow swirls of her tongue, but his strange skin dried quickly, so that even the gentlest pass of her fist scraped on her ears. She soon abandoned the effort to suckle at him instead, managing with determination and no small pain to take perhaps half his cock into her mouth. She moved there for some time, claiming and reclaiming the same few inches while milking the rest in her fists.

“You promised me enthusiasm,” Azrael murmured, combing idly through her hair.

She pulled back enough to catch a breath and say, “My knees hurt,” before latching on again, this time suckling slow kisses all the way along his undershaft to his balls. They were very hard and smooth, like twinned eggs with just the thinnest velvet cover over them, and she spent some time there, pulling each one gently into her mouth for her tongue to tease while petting his cock where it rested in her hair.

“You have some skill at this,” Azrael remarked.

“I should. Would you like to know who taught me?” she asked, rising up on her knees to trap his cock between her breasts and bob slowly up and down. “Or how old I was?”

“Another appeal to my sympathies,” he explained to the empty room. “You can tell by the withering of my cock—” His cock was stone between her breasts. “—that I am deeply moved.”

Lan shrugged and bent her head so as to lick the very head of him whenever it pushed out into the open air. “I can’t help it if it sounds that way. I don’t think I could say anything about my life that wouldn’t. Or anyone else’s life, for that matter.”

“Shall we trade tales, you and I? Shall I tell you of my childhood and the games I was taught to play in those first years? Oh, I was a child once,” he said, seeing her startled upturned face. “I was never human, but I was of woman born. It is my first memory—pushed out into the light between the mountains of her thighs, the cold air and hot blood, and the screams. I remember that she held me, too weak to run, and her voice as she begged for my life was the same voice I had heard so long in the warm oceans of her womb. It lulled me and so I closed my infant eyes and did not see when the man took the stone from her small hearth and crushed her skull. Her blood fell across my face, blinding me with redness. Her brains fell into my mouth. Through this gore, I saw the man raise up the stone while every other man and woman among them did nothing, and I saw the stone grow huge as he brought it down.”

Azrael wrested himself from her slack, staring grip with just one backwards step. His eyes were burning brighter, lighting the ruins of his face and staining whatever his gaze raked across with faint crimson. “My bones do not break, but I felt the plates of my infant skull separate, heard the sound it makes, tasted my own blood in my mouth. All this, but I do not die. I have been burned, beaten, starved, crushed, stabbed, torn. Do you know, little one, the exquisite pain of drowning? Not for moments or even minutes, but for years? I have felt ice forming in my blood and smelled the smoke of my own flesh. I have worn chains until they rusted through!” He caught hers in his fist, gave them a derisive shake, then flung them at the footboard of his bed. “When at last they thought of entombing me, I embraced my captivity, though it meant aeons in the lonely dark, eternally dying of hunger and thirst, enduring the damp and the cold and the deafening silence, so tell me, o unhappy human, what is your suffering to mine?”

His voice had been rising throughout this terrible speech so that his last words were delivered at a bellow. Now his bedroom door banged open, spilling out half a dozen pikemen who all slid to an uncertain halt as they saw their Master, naked, erect and furious over his chained captive. Azrael threw them a snarl of dismissal and stalked away to the furthest point of the room while they bowed themselves out.

“Now they will wait in the hall all day,” he spat once the door had finally closed, “straining to hear my command to have you executed.”

“It doesn’t appear to be dampening your mood.”

He glared at her, then gave his undiminished erection a contemptuous half-wave. “Flesh has its own priorities. One learns to endure.” He eyed her sourly for a long span of uncomfortable quiet and then, with an air of one who knows better, said, “Are we done with this pointless game of yours?”

“I’m not playing one.”

“You are. You know that you will never win me to show mercy. You act the hero’s role surprisingly well, but if you know how it will end, you know also that it is an act. How long must we play it?”

“End the war. Take back your Eaters and let us die.”

“No.”

“Then I guess we keep playing until you kill me.”

“A particularly wasted move in the game, since no one is here to witness your sacrifice. Besides which, you cannot be a martyr to your fool’s cause unless I allow you to die.” He glanced at his stubbornly insistent cock. “You are losing my good humor. Now come, what is it you truly desire? You could have the meat of my table, the wine of my cup. You could have rooms of your own within these walls, servants to attend you, privilege beyond your most reckless imaginings. And you will have had worse lovers, I assure you. I have no pity, but I do know passion.”

“I want nothing but for you to end the war.”

“Never will I allow Man to take back his dominion over this earth. What bejeweled chalice,” he said suddenly, with more than an edge of frustration, “do you hold between your thighs that my sipping from it is worth so many lives?”

It was not clear whether he referred to the value of human lives, or the mindless residue possessed by the screaming Eaters. “I’ll do—”

“Whatever I ask,” he finished for her. “Do you imagine I have never had a willing woman? I have had five at once in that very bed, each of them vying for the privilege I offer you now. You’ve a mouth that I’m sure has paid for many, many bottles of water in the world outside, but here, it is just another mouth.”

“You’re interrupting me.”

His eyes narrowed. In pointed silence, he drew up his arms and folded them across his chest, staring down at her.

At last, she had to say it: “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

He let that weak conclusion sit awhile, making absolutely certain she was done before dryly saying, “My apologies. I did not realize the damage my interruption would do.” He glanced at his cock, then suddenly turned away, bellowing for his chamberlain.

The doors opened. A dead man bowed his way inside and began unobtrusively to collect Azrael’s discarded garments from the bath and select fresh ones from the wardrobe in the corner. When it was opened, she could see flashes of firelight reflected. There had been mirrors affixed to the doors once, but they had been broken and never replaced.

“Are you getting dressed?” Lan asked.

“Ha! And is there some reason I should not?”

“I’m willing—”

“So you’ve said. And said. And said. Indeed, I’ve heard so much talk of your willingness that I must take some time to ponder it lest some vital point slip my consideration. Guard! My guest would seem to prefer the meditation garden to my bedchamber. Escort her.”

“Wait—”

“It’s certain to be a cold day,” Azrael overrode her, “but there should still be a fire by which you might warm yourself. If it’s gone out, I’ll have another lit for you.”

To watch another man burn…from the beginning this time…in full daylight. She would have to see hair melt and skin blacken, smell fat as it popped and crackled, and hear him scream until his lungs charred and split.

Her mother, writhing in flames…screaming…for hours…

“No,” Lan heard herself say.

The pikeman seized Lan’s arm and pulled her to her feet, forcing her either to stumble along beside him or be dragged.

“No!” Lan struggled to turn around, ducking her head in a futile attempt to evade her guard’s cuffs. “Please!”

The guard swung his pike around and raised the butt of it for a blow, only to just as suddenly lower it and step back with a bow. Lan staggered free of him, turning to see Azrael with his hand upraised, regarding her while his chamberlain continued silently to dress him.

“So you can beg,” he mused. “Although I note you do even that with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Do you think you can refuse my table, refuse my bed, refuse even my garden, all with impunity? My hospitality is finite, child, and unless you can convince me otherwise, you have reached the end of it.”

“Please.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he warned her with a mocking smile. “Come, come. You cannot have run dry of stirring speeches already! Why, you’ve only just arrived.”

“I’ve seen so many fires,” she said, pushing the words through a throat much too small for them. “Please don’t make me. You can chain me up. You can do anything, just…please…no more fires.”

He gazed at her without moving for what seemed a long time as the pikeman held her in his dead grip, then said, “Take her to the Red Room,” and turned away.

* * *

The Red Room was at once the most opulent and least comfortable room in which Lan had ever slept, and that after all the hostel cells, ferry vans, abandoned city ruins and of course, the Women’s Lodge at Norwood, her home, and home to all the women and girls of the settlement who were unmarried and therefore vulnerable. There, only a few filthy curtains had separated the thin mattress where Lan and her mother slept from the others and each night’s sleep had been broken by the snores, whispers and errant kicks of her thrashing neighbors. Compared to that, the Red Room, even at scarcely ten paces wall to wall, was luxurious indeed, but it was not restful.

She could not guess what the room might have been back when humans lived here, but having spent so many recent nights in hostels, it had the look of a prison to Lan, even though it was situated high in one of the towers of Azrael’s palace and not underground, where she was accustomed to seeing prisons. The walls were bare stone, painted a deep, unrestful red. The ceiling was made of square tiles, also red. The floor had been laid with a red, patternless rug over red-painted boards. The bed, red-lacquered posts, fine red sheets, plush red blankets, red cushions. Even the chamberpot was enameled in red. The effect was that of a room soaked in blood.

The only light came through a narrow slit of a window, glassless, that admitted a welcome, if chill, breeze and allowed her to look out over the high palace wall, beyond Azrael’s patrolling guards, at the city of Haven, whose residents were just stirring—waking, if the dead slept—to go about whatever they had instead of lives. She watched for a while, but could never quite pretend it was a city like the ones in old magazines, or that it could ever go back to being one.

So yes, it was luxurious, but no, not restful and after some time attempting sleep in the soft red bed she had all to herself, Lan pulled the blankets and one cushion onto the floor and slept there instead, facing into the shadows beneath the bed where all she could see was black. She tried to make herself see pictures, the way she’d done as a child, but all she conjured up was a headache and a few indistinct blurs pulsing in the rhythm of sex.

Could she fuck him? Probably. Shapes in the dark lose power in the light; she’d had his cock in her hand and tasted its deadalive taste. She thought she could probably fuck him just fine. Could she be his dolly? That, she didn’t know.

Lan, a dollygirl. Not just a quick one now and then to buy her meals (or end the Eaters, her brain stubbornly supplied), but a true dolly. It wasn’t unheard of, even in a small village like Norwood. The mayor had a dolly for a few years, when Lan was still too young to really be aware of it. Lisah Tuttle. She had her own house and everything. Often, little Lan would hang over the top of the fence and watch her do her washing—all fine clothes and frilly knickers, and herself pinning them up with her hair in ringlets and ribbons, smiling over her shoulder at Lan until Lan’s mother hauled her away.

“What does she sell?” she’d asked once, because even then, she’d known there was barter in it somewhere. Lisah Tuttle didn’t work in the greenhouses or chase pigs around the sty. Lisah Tuttle’s hands were soft and white as curd and her shoes were always clean. Lan didn’t know what Lisah’s trade was in, but she knew, even at that young age, that she wanted it.

Her mother had looked up from the lunch they were sharing during their brief respite before they got back in the rows, cocking her head so she could aim her good eye through the dirty glass at the blur that was Lisah swishing through the streets. “Everything,” she said. “All she has.”

“Do you reckon I could sell it, too?” asked Little Lan, wistfully. “If I ever get some?”

“I won’t tell you not to,” her mother told her after a moment’s hard stare. “This isn’t the world for that. But I will say, once you start selling, you never really stop. So when the time comes, trade hard and sell in pieces. A dolly wears the nicest dresses and has the prettiest face, but when she’s done being played with, she goes up on the shelf or into the box and she doesn’t get to complain. A dolly’s owned, her whole self. Understand?”

And Little Lan had nodded, because who didn’t know what a dolly was? Most of the girls in Norwood played dollies, even though only a few had real ones with painted porcelain faces and fancy dresses with ribbons and lace. Elvie Peters had a dolly like that. Lan had a clothy with the hair drawn on, or rather, she used to have one. One of the mayor’s boys, Eithon, had snatched it away and when they were fighting for it, it had ripped up the middle between her legs, which made all the boys hoot and poke at it, so Lan had run home in tears with no dolly at all. Her mother might have scrounged up another if she’d asked, but she never did. Her reasons had something to do with the sight of those boys, jeering and stabbing their fingers at her torn dolly, but it was a queer, hot-faced reason that didn’t come with words. Anyway, she understood all about dollies and how they were owned. Lan’s dolly had been split and poked and then dropped in the mud where it had probably been picked up by one of the mayor’s dogs and carried off for a gnaw toy, and Dolly did not complain. What all this had to do with Lisah Tuttle, she had no idea, but dollies, she understood very well.

She understood them even better now. Little Lan had grown up and if there were bits she’d sold over the years, at least she’d sold them dear. She was no man’s dolly and never would be.

But she couldn’t sleep.

And after all, it was a silly thing to stick to, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she come to Haven accepting—hell, expecting—to die? What sense did it make to put a higher price-tag on her body than her life?

Lan caught herself drumming her fingers on the floor and made herself stop. She’d never drummed her fingers on anything in her life. That was him, creeping into her. He didn’t get to do that. She wasn’t his dolly yet.

Or at all. Or ever.

Maybe.

Unpleasant, he’d said. It will be unpleasant, but she’d be compensated. How unpleasant, exactly? About the most oddjob thing Lan had ever agreed to was to take a cold bath and lie perfectly still so the fella could pretend she was dead while he was crawling on her. That was unpleasant, but Azrael certainly didn’t lack for dead women, if he wanted one. What did he want?

Her. For whatever reason, he wanted her. The only question was, how much was she selling?

All, she realized. For the Eaters, she’d sell it all.

So decided, she shut her eyes against the darkness and forced herself to sleep.

She dreamed in tangles, never quite knowing whether she was awake or not, but whenever she thought she was out, she found herself again in Norwood, hearing screams and choking on the smell of smoke and peaches. If there was more to the dreams than that, she didn’t know it. She never remembered her dreams anymore.

She was awakened by the heavy stride of boots on the landing outside her room and keys scraping in an old lock. As she uncurled her stiff body, the door opened to reveal one of Azrael’s guards, interchangeable with the one who had brought her here. He looked down at her without emotion, without even a hint of curiosity as to why she should be on the floor with an empty bed right next to her. “Our lord commands you join him for breakfast.”

So soon? By habit, she looked out to gauge the time from the sun’s position in the sky, but it hardly seemed to have moved. She supposed she was decided and a few hours more or less made no difference, but she wished she’d had at least a chance to sleep on it.

Pushing herself slowly into a sitting position, Lan rubbed at those of her joints that had come out the worst for being pressed to the floor, aware only of the cold and her many hurts, not the least of which was her bladder. Glancing at the chamberpot, she said, “Can you give me a minute?”

If the disdainful look he gave her was not reply enough, his cool tone as he said, “Our lord’s subjects do not chose the hour at which they obey him,” would have surely withered anyone else who had dared the question.

Lan got up. “Unless your lord doesn’t mind if his subjects piss themselves at the table, give me a damn minute.”

The guard recoiled, his pretty mouth pursing into a moue of aristocratic distaste. “Vulgar, gutter-crawling quim,” he muttered (a rather loud mutter) and slammed the door on her.

Lan used the facilities, such as they were, finger-combed her hair and shook out her clothes so they looked a little less slept in. She wished she had some way to check her reflection—a windowpane or even a polished bit of metal—but there was nothing here. In some desperation, she spat into her palm and scrubbed at her face, hoping to take away some of the grime or at least put some color in her cheeks.

When the door opened again, she was ready, although she could see by her guard’s expression her appearance was not much improved. Never mind. It was Azrael whose opinion mattered.

They descended the narrow, winding stairs in a silence broken only by her breath and the dual tromping of their boots. His were nicer and made a crisp, soldierly sound; hers, patched leather with soles made from strips of old tires, clumped along out of rhythm. Here on the cramped, dingy stairs, it wasn’t so bad, but soon they were out again in the oppressive grandeur of his palace, where her footsteps were small and awkward and even the air felt too clean for her to use.

The pikemen stationed outside the dining hall uncrossed their weapons so that her guard could open the doors, although both sneered at her a little as Lan passed. Within, the same long table, the same multitude of platters and ewers, the same silent banks of servants lining the walls, and Azrael, of course, seated in his throne.

Apart from them, the hall was empty. There were no plates set before the rows of chairs where his Children and their courtiers had been the night before. The amounts and variety of foods appeared undiminished, but they were for Azrael alone, it seemed. Azrael raised his hand, palm upturned, and lazily beckoned. Until he did so, Lan had not realized she had stopped and was just standing there at the foot of one table, staring at the emptiness. Now she forced her feet to unroot and walked forever down the length of that hall to reach the chair he indicated, but she did not sit.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

“I have elected not to provide you an audience in the hopes you will not feel so inspired to perform.” He glanced at her and resumed disinterested dissection of the meat occupying his plate. “Be seated.”

She eased into the chair. The arms were padded with some soft fabric she could not name; when she ran her hands over them, she left smudges. Seeing them, she put her hands on her knees.

Azrael gestured without bothering to look at the servant who came running to set another place at the table. “Eat. You must be hungry.”

She was, but still she tried to ignore the insistent watering of her mouth as the servant filled her platter with a meal as abundant as Azrael’s own—breads, both sweet and savory, baked in braids, rolls, loaves and even more fanciful shapes; more meat than she’d seen even in the market, some cased into sausages, some carved into slabs, some still on the bone and some whole-roasted, but all hot and gleaming with juices; bowls of every kind of cooked grain awaited her selection, surrounded by dishes of milk and cream, sculpted butters, honey and jam and even sugar. All these things the servant artfully arranged across silver platters and crystal bowls, but Lan touched none of it.

Azrael waited, watching her as he picked unhurriedly through his own breakfast, and finally said, “I take it this means you refuse my offer.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. She waited to feel something—her mother’s disapproval, maybe—but all she felt was tired. She had to wonder…had she sold all the pieces already? Was there nothing left to even care?

“So you merely refuse my table. Or is it my company—” He passed a hand over his body, putting the whole scarred horror of him on display. “—that puts you off your appetite?”

“I just don’t feel like eating.”

Her stomach growled.

Azrael scraped his thumbclaw along the rim of his cup and tapped it twice, then put it down. He laced his fingers together and leaned back in his throne. “I have nothing you want,” he said for her. “I have nothing you need. You will do only what you must, grudgingly, and I am never to forget it. Is that the way of it?”

Lan didn’t answer, but she didn’t drop her eyes either.

“I see you still believe yourself the hero of this little farce. In your mind, you stand for all your beleaguered people and especially, for those of Norwood. They starve and so you will starve, for you are one heart, however the distance. Ah, humanity, whose spirit conquers even in chains.”

“Stop making fun of me.”

“You are not in Norwood,” he told her, each word like the final cut of a headsman’s axe. He gave that a moment to sink in, then smiled. “You are in Haven, under my shadow, and you will find that my shadow stains. You abandon your noble human principles when you embrace me.”

“You can have my body,” Lan told him. “But that’s all you get.”

“No,” he replied calmly, quietly. “I will have it all, whether you give it gladly or no.”

“Do your worst,” Lan said, as trite as that was. She even laughed when she said it. “Do your very fucking worst.”

The grey skin above his mask creased as he raised one eyebrow beneath it. “All right,” he said mildly.

Lan’s bravado had enough momentum to last a few seconds more, so that she could still watch with her head high and a smile she didn’t feel frozen on her lips as he beckoned a servant to him and gave a command too quietly for her to hear, but after the servant hurried away, he only sat there, watching her watch him, and the longer she had to wait for it, the less ready she felt for whatever was coming. She made herself think of her mother—her bare feet kicking in the fire, her head lolling on her broken neck—but it didn’t shore her up like it had on her long walk to Ashcroft.

The servant returned with a tray on which was set a covered dish with a high, domed lid. She placed it before Lan.

“Eat with me,” Azrael ordered. And smiled. “We can still speak of pleasant things.”

He waited. She said nothing.

“And so we begin.” Azrael dipped his fingers in a little bowl of water, wiped them on a napkin, and gestured.

The servant removed the cover to reveal a single fruit.

Lan’s heart dropped out of her. She felt it tear free, felt the hole where it had been. It was a hole about the same size as the peach she saw before her—round and ripe and just blushed with pink on one side. A Norwood peach.

“It’s a lie,” she heard herself say.

“Is it?”

“You couldn’t possibly get to Norwood and back so soon.”

“The dead travel fast. And truthfully, child, it wasn’t far.”

“I won’t eat it.”

“I think you will.”

“Well, I won’t!”

Her little shout was nothing in that great hall. She grabbed the peach and threw it. Azrael did not flinch as it flew by, missing him by a hand’s span or less.

The servant fetched it back again and placed it, bruised, on its dish.

“I think you will,” Azrael said again, softly. “If you share my bed, you share my table. If you do not share my table, you will be removed from Haven. Consider that. All your heroic ambitions ended, your mother’s bones unavenged and my hungering dead yet at large in the world, because you would not eat a peach. Is that truly such a sacrifice?” He took another peach from the bowl on his table and carved out a slice with a knife. He ate slow, savoring, and smiled when it was gone. “They are especially sweet, aren’t they?”

“You can’t make me do this!”

“Oh, I could,” he said with disturbingly quiet confidence. “But I won’t. I’ll not starve you, or have you pipe-fed, or prize your jaws apart to force its flesh between your teeth, but neither shall I wait all day for you to admit what you have already decided. When I am finished—” He carved out another slice of peach and held it up for her to see before eating it. “—so are you.”

“What did you do to Norwood?”

“I? Nothing. I was here.”

“Your Revenants. Obeying your orders.”

“Was it not you who planted the seed of my interest?” he countered. “Why should you not share in the fruits?”

“Did you kill them? Just tell me what happened!”

“What matter? The flavor is neither sweetened nor soured by counting the dead.” He ate another slice of peach. Half of it was gone now. Half, so fast. “A dry field welcomes blood as much as rain and yields as fair a harvest.”

“You’re a monster.”

“So I’m told. Eat.”

She looked at the peach, but did not touch it.

“It is in the nature of Man to see symbols in the most ordinary things,” Azrael mused, watching her. “To make relics out of objects and divine omens from natural phenomena. You see Norwood before you now, don’t you? You see people and homes and how noble it is to suffer oppression and defy tyranny…but it is just a peach. Those whose insignificant lives you wish it to encapsulate will never know what happened here at my table. What difference does it make to their misery and grief if you go hungry or not? Shall you go home to them and boast of your sacrifice here as they stand in the ruins my Revenants left them, as if your suffering was equal to theirs?”

“Just tell me if they’re dead!”

“What if they were? How does that at all alter the equation? Suppose my Revenants slaughtered all, burned the orchards, salted the earth…are you any less resolved to end my hungering dead? Or to put another way, is your determination to do so dependent upon those in Norwood celebrating your return? Because if it is,” he said with a chuckle, “I think you have rather a shock coming. The living who seek welcome in Haven are rarely held in high regard by those denied it.”

“They can think what they want.”

“They will,” he replied evenly. “And they already think you a traitor. Now, after my Revenants have followed your wake to their homes, they will know it. You will never convince them otherwise with the tale of fruit you would not eat, so all that remains is to decide how steeply you sold your integrity. For the Eaters? Or for a peach.” He carved into his diminishing peach, eying hers, as yet untouched. “You’re running out of time, child.”

Her traitor hand rose, reaching. She looked at him, hating him, hating herself. “All of it?” she asked. Her voice shook, scarcely louder than a whisper.

“A bite sufficed Eve in the garden,” he replied nonsensically. “It’s enough for me.”

Lan took the peach. It was soft in her hand, perfectly ripe. She looked at him, her dirty fingers digging furrows into its golden flesh, and bit; its juice filled her mouth, as thick as blood. She forced down a swallow and threw it back into the bowl with a shaking hand. It bounced out again and rolled off the table for the servant to chase after.

He waited until her trembling had stopped and the room was still once more before saying, gently, “But it was sweet, wasn’t it?”

“Now tell me! Tell me what you did!”

“I did nothing,” he said again. “And my Revenants merely collected what I already possess, after some small resistance. Norwood stands where and as you left it, its farms hale and walls sound. I wish them only well. What a sorrowing world it would be without peaches.” He returned his attention to his meal, waving distractedly at her plate. “Now eat. You’ve brokered your soul the same, whether you pay with one bite or many, so eat your fill. I’ll be no less impressed by your defiance, I assure you.”

“You couldn’t be less impressed, you mean,” she muttered, pulling the bowl of porridge to her—cooled now—with one hand and snatching at sweet rolls with the other.

“You would seem to understand that well for one who still defies me. Needlessly, I might add. You are not my slave. I will not hold you in chains and demand submission to my lustful will upon pain of torture. You have a spoon,” he remarked, watching her scoop up heaping mouthfuls of porridge on chunks of bread.

“So?”

“Use it.”

She laughed through her porridge. “Why?”

“Because I tell you to,” he said evenly. “Shall we revisit what that means?”

“Which one is mine?” she asked, eying the assortment of utensils close to her plate.

“All of them.”

“Which one am I supposed to…?”

“It doesn’t matter for today. I am content only that you make the effort. In the future…but I presume. Shall you stay?”

“I said I’d do it.”

“You did,” he agreed. “And then you attempted to starve yourself to prove how unwillingly you acquiesce. Hear me. I do not ask my concubines to pretend affection, but I see no reason I should tolerate hostility in my own house.”

He paused, perhaps waiting for her to tell him again it wasn’t his. She didn’t. She sure thought it, but all she said was, “Sorry.”

“I accept your apology. I understand this is not easy for you.” He drummed his fingers once on the tabletop. “Did you sleep well?”

She looked up, spoon in hand, puzzled.

“It is customary for the host to make polite inquiry as to the guest’s comfort,” he told her. “And for the guest to make gracious acknowledgment of the host’s hospitality. Pleasant conversation is one of your new responsibilities. Did you sleep well?”

She wasn’t sure how to answer, so she said, “Did you?”

“When last I slept, yes. But that was many months ago and is a circumstance unlikely to recur during your tenure here.”

“So what was that room you took me to last night?”

“My own. Although the bed is, I admit, mainly ornamental.”

“Will I have to sleep there?”

She didn’t particularly relish the idea and it must have showed, because he looked at her for a long time before he finally said, “I prefer to enjoy my concubines in my chamber, but if it so disturbs you, I can easily make other arrangements when we meet.”

“It isn’t that, it’s just…it’s so different from the rest of the palace. Like a prison.”

“What would you know of prisons?” he asked with a contemptuous twist of a smile.

“I’ve stayed in plenty of hostels. I mean, it’s obvious you made some changes, but was it? A prison?”

He rolled one broad shoulder in a shrugging gesture that made it clear shrugging was not natural to him. “It may well have been. My new home is old indeed, as humans measure age, and its memories are largely lost. But those who came immediately before me had no use for prisons in their home and neither have I. I shaped it to its present purpose. Perhaps when I’ve no further need of it, I’ll shape it to another. Did you sleep well?”

“You keep asking.”

“As with the training of any animal, repetition and patience are the key to success.”

The rebuke, and the tone of mild amusement with which he spoke it, brought a blush like twin slaps to her cheeks. She was suddenly too aware of how she looked—filthy and stinking at his elegant table, stuffing herself on fine foods like a starving dog. She stirred at her porridge, then pushed it away. “I slept fine.”

“You seem disappointed. You didn’t think you’d sleep at all, here in the Devil’s house, did you? But you were tired. Humans so often underestimate how erosive it is to be tired, day after day,” he mused, gazing into his cup. “Or to be hungry. Or cold. Or unwashed.”

Lan frowned, self-consciously tucking her arms closer to her body.

“You came to me believing you came prepared for an endless siege, but I tell you, you came half-surrendered. In another handful of days, you will sit at my table without hesitation. In a year, you will ask me to send to Norwood for peaches.”

“No, I won’t.”

He chuckled indulgently over his cup. “So defiant.”

“Defiance has nothing to do with it. I’ve had to eat them my whole life. I hate peaches.”

He looked at her, then laughed—a great bellow of a laugh that filled the hall and caused no small number of servants to exchange nervous glances. When the last echo had died, he raised his hands and clapped them, slowly, three times. “If you planned that, you planned it well. I find myself feeling most favorably toward you.”

Lan opened her mouth.

“Not that favorably.” He started to reach for his cup, then paused, tapping his thumbclaw against the rim as he regarded her, before finally picking it up. “Yet favorably enough to make some small concession, if you would meet me.”

“Meet you where?”

“Meet me how, you meant to say. I answer, if you will refrain from making your tiresome entreaty for what remains of this meal, I will grant you a second audience in my bedchamber tonight, where you may make all the tiresome entreaties you please.”

“You…just want me to sit here?”

“And talk with me.”

She frowned. He ate, watching her with that scarred, crooked smile.

“About what?” she asked finally.

He opened both arms, gesturing to the whole world.

“And in exchange, you’ll consider ending the war.”

“Never,” he said. “But I will allow you to ask. Are we agreed?”

“I guess so.” Lan picked a grape from its fellows—the only other fruit she recognized, apart from peaches—and ate it. She wasn’t hungry any more, was in fact a bit nauseous and overfull, but the chance to eat a grape was more than she could resist. “Can I talk about the dead or is that considered tiresome?”

“It is tiresome, but I suppose if I forbid it, you’ll have nothing of your own experience to speak of. Speak then, but choose your words well. My patience for criticism is thin.”

Lan ate another grape and thought. At last, she said, “Do you control them, like puppets, or just bring them back and let them go, like a toy you wind up and release?”

He lifted his head and stared at her a moment before resuming his meal. “The latter, although there are degrees to which I ‘wind’ my toys.”

“So the only ones you control are the Eaters.”

“Not even they.”

“Then why do they attack us?”

“In all creatures, there exists the animal urge to kill and feed. Humans imagine themselves a civilized exception, but those you call Eaters betray their true instincts, when all the manners and moral constraints are relieved. No, I do not aim them at your settlements and cry havoc, I merely wake them to a sense of hunger with no sense of consequence.”

“Merely.”

“I could have raised them with all their animal urges intact. Imagine, if you will, the endless tides of the dead seeking actively to drive invading rivals from their territory.” He took a deep drink from his cup and smiled at her. “Or to mate.”

She could not quite keep the thoughts that rose in her at that off her face.

“But no, my intent was one of benign co-existence,” he went on. “The Eaters are not meant to exterminate humanity, but only to keep it at bay so that I and my few favored may live in peace.”

“Benign? How can you even say that?”

“And how can you claim otherwise?” he countered. “They are the least of my creations, possessing the very palest spark of life. They have no capacity to reason, no understanding of weapons or tools, and lack all sense of self-preservation. Can you deny they are confounded by the least defenses? A wall that even a child could climb will hold back their multitudes indefinitely. A simple latch that a dog might be taught to paw at will forever remain beyond their ability to open. And you can well afford to wait them out as they mill around your settlements, can’t you? Their flesh has no integrity, for I have raised them to rot. Even in this poor corner of the world, they are reduced to harmless bones in months. It is human perversity that demands you cleave to your holdings here, for in other warmer, wetter climes, no Eater can retain cohesion more than a few days. And what the elements do not undo, the hungry hordes of insects and scavenging beasts consume. Still, you must imagine yourself beset and waste precious resources and even more precious lives to plink away at an enemy that would be of absolutely no threat to you if you just left them alone!”

His sudden shout at the end of what had been a calm, if caustic, speech made her flinch. He stopped there, glaring and breathing hard through the mouth-slit of his mask, then waved away the guards who had looked in at them and leaned back in his throne.

“But the living will never leave the dead alone,” he said, once more calm. “No more than they will leave me and my Children alone. The dead are an offense to the living and always have been. I understand that and I accept that there shall never be peace, but still I have made my Haven. And Man, who could as easily build cities of his own, has instead chosen the most senseless vengeance—the killing of the dead.”

“You don’t think much of us, do you?”

He cast a wry glance at her, then looked thoughtfully around his dining room, his gaze lingering at every ornate fixture and decoration. “Humans are such a contradiction in their very essence that I find I can neither wholly hate nor envy them, even after all these years and all the cause I have been given. Your capacity for destruction, terrible as it is, is as evenly matched by your ability to create and to imagine. I could never have built such a hall.” He picked up one of the utensils at his side and tossed it toward her, saying, “I could never have built such a spoon! Whatever it is in you that sees what is not there, I lack it, utterly.”

Lan picked up his spoon and studied the delicate shapes swirling down its handle. “We don’t make things like this anymore, either. I’ve never eaten with a spoon in Norwood.”

“But you will, someday. When the insult of your present circumstance finally fades and you become bored with the squalor of your surroundings, you’ll make new ones. That is your greatest quality.”

“Making spoons?”

“Making worlds. You humans,” he said, almost sighing. “You pride yourselves so on strength, on killing, and for what? Worms kill each other. It takes no wit.” He picked up another spoon—why would anyone need so many?—and turned it so the handle caught the light. “But nothing else in all the world could conceive of this design or bring it into substance. Is that not a marvel?”

“I guess so.”

He smiled, replacing the spoon with its mates. “Meaning not.”

“Meaning…I don’t know. Sure, it’s pretty, but I look at this place—” Now it was her turn to run her eyes around the high ceiling and glittering chandeliers, down carved pillars and around paintings, to the richly-carpeted floor and claw-footed furnishings that weighted it. “—and I don’t see it the way you do. I can’t imagine anyone making it…or even why they would. If you told me you raised it with you out of the earth, I’d believe it and it would be just as marvelous.”

“Would you indeed?”

His undisguised scorn at the superstitious awe of humankind put an edge on her reply: “You can raise the dead, can’t you? During the war, you spread plagues and withered crops and made it rain poison. Look outside!” She waved one arm at the nearest window, but although a few heads turned among the guards, Azrael’s gaze never shifted. “Look what you did to the sky! And for no other reason except you could! It would be stupider to assume those were the limits of your power, especially when all the rest of the world is in ruins and your Haven is so wonderful.”

“The sky…” He leaned back in his throne to regard her, swirling wine around his cup in a pensive, playful way. “Who told you I was responsible for that?”

“Everyone knows.”

“And they say winners write history.” Azrael shook his head and favored her with a thin, humorless smile. “There was indeed a storm in those days and it swept up a great miasma into the atmosphere that did sour all the sky. The moon became as sackcloth. The sun became as blood. The black rain fell, burning away the skin and eyes of those poor beasts who could find no shelter from it. They lay in heaps along the roads where I passed, rotting where they fell in pools of that stinking rain…but of course, it was I who caused the famine that followed, I who unleashed the winds of plague. How much easier it is to be the victim of your enemy than admit you have…” His smile wavered. He looked away. “…become him,” he murmured, almost to himself.

She didn’t believe him, but he said it with such calm intensity that she could feel her certainty shaken. Of course he’d done it. Who else could have?…but if he had, why hadn’t he done it since? Why fight as he’d done, with Revenants and Eaters, if he could just wave his hand and bring down the poison rain?

“Where did it come from, then?” she asked.

He glanced at her, frowning, then up at the window, and finally stared into his cup again. “It was the consequence of the last weapons fired against me. No doubt you would have found it inspiring, to see all the peoples of the world united in the murder of me, their conviction such that they chose to risk the poisoning of every man, woman and child who might survive the inferno rather than submit to my ascension. Ah well. Perhaps it was not deliberate. Perhaps its effects surprised even those who approved its use. Perhaps they regretted it when they saw what they had done.” His mouth twisted into another of those bitter smiles. “They regretted it enough to blame me. Yet Man survived, as Man does, and the stain that he left upon the sky is already much less than it was.” He looked at her again, still smiling. “So it is the living rumor of my power, is it? Mm. When it fades away entirely, will Men credit my mercy?”

“They might,” Lan said, trying to appear casual by spreading butter on a small loaf she didn’t even have room to eat. “If you made more merciful gestures.”

“Such as surrendering the dead to die?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you’ve kept your end of the bargain to the letter of the words by which it was struck, all the while attacking its spirit. You’ve the makings of a natural diplomat.”

“Thanks. When do I get my audience?”

“This evening, following dinner.”

“Evening?” Lan twisted in her chair to check a window. It didn’t face east, so she couldn’t see the sun, but she could tell just by the color of the overcast sky that it wasn’t even mid-morning yet. “Oh for… Can’t we just get to it?”

He had started to raise his cup to his lips. Now he paused. His fingers tightened. He set it down again without drinking. “Impatient, are we?” he said, affecting a dry tone, but it was an affectation and, hearing it, Lan’s cheeks burned.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, picking over the food that remained on her plate. “We can keep talking.”

“Much as I enjoy your company, alas, other matters require my attention.”

“Like what?”

“Civil affairs. The minutiae of managing a city such as Haven.” He gestured vaguely at everything, nothing. “The demands upon my days are many.”

Lan frowned, her curiosity scratching through her frustration in spite of herself. “Like what?” she asked again. “Maybe I could help if I knew what the problem is.”

“Anything is possible, I suppose, but why would you?”

“Isn’t that how this works? I do for you, you do for me?”

He uttered a low laugh, then suddenly shoved his throne back and stood. Circling around the table, Azrael descended the dais with his eyes fixed and unblinking, staring her down like a predator. Her hand tightened on her knife; she put it down and watched him come. When he reached her, he put one huge, scarred hand on the back of her chair and the other on the table before her, effectively trapping her between his arms as he bent low and pinned her in the white light of his stare. In a voice as soft and as ominous as a distant roll of thunder, he said, “Do what you will, you will never have what you want of me.”

“Never is a long time,” she said. Her voice shook only a little. Her gaze never broke. She could be proud of that, at least.

“Longer than you know.” He straightened, taking away the oppressive non-weight of his body looming over her and the very real heat that had come throbbing through the sockets of his mask where his inhuman eyes burned. “You will never have what you want of me,” he said again, lightly now, “yet it remains you may still have much. Come now, what is it you truly desire? A more comfortable room? Servants? Jewels? Let us negotiate terms. I offer safety and shelter you will never find elsewhere in the world.”

“That’s why I have to keep asking. Because safety and shelter ought to be everywhere.”

“You are going to be a challenge, aren’t you? So be it. Guards!”

“Back to the garden?” she guessed, already standing.

“That should please you, but no. I haven’t the time, nor indeed the temper, to deal with you now. Perhaps a taste of the luxuries I can provide will sweeten your demeanor when we meet again.” He turned his attention to the pikemen approaching the dais. “Take her to Lady Batuuli. Inform my daughter I trust her to see to it that my guest is comfortably prepared for her audience tonight.”

“I can prepare myself.”

Azrael rolled a dismissive eye over her. “All evidence to the contrary.”

Lan brushed crumbs self-consciously from her shirt-front and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

“In any case, you are here on a diplomatic endeavor and as such, you are obliged to accept my hospitality. Batuuli despises me,” Azrael added, “so she may not even receive you, but I think she will. No doubt it will amuse her to meet you and so measure the declining quality of my concubines.”

“No doubt,” Lan said caustically, getting up and pretending not to see the way the pikemen immediately closed in around her. “I’ll see you tonight then.”

“I look forward to it.” He dismissed her with a wave and returned to his throne.

One of Lan’s escorts gave her a nudge, but she lingered, watching Azrael beckon a servant over to top off his wine and another to offer him a selection of pasties. “I thought you said you had stuff to do.”

He gazed at her while his servants cleared Lan’s dishes and took her uneaten food away. “Enjoy my daughter’s company, if you can,” he said at last, then shifted his eyes to his guards. Hands closed unyieldingly on her arms and they started walking, leaving Azrael to finish his meal alone.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lady Batuuli did receive her. In fact, she seemed more annoyed by the knock on her door than by the command Lan’s escorts delivered, dismissing them with an impatient nod and a snap of her fingers to summon Lan to her, although as soon as those fine doors were shut, she let out a sudden (and still beautiful) scream: “Is there no end to his pettiness?” Seizing some elegant sculpture unfortunate enough to be within reach, she smashed it against the wall and kicked the larger of its scattered pieces at what remained of one of the guards who had first brought Lan into the dining hall. Flayed, burned and still breathing, he hung impaled on a spear set in a marble pedestal and watched Batuuli exhaust her rage. “Must I now perfume his whores to prove my filial obedience?”

“I can leave if you want.”

“You can be silent!” Batuuli spat, rounding on her with her hands in beautiful claws. “Save your tongue for my father!”

“Did I hear someone mention whores?”

Lady Batuuli straightened at once, raising one eyebrow but not bothering to turn around as the door to an adjoining room opened and her brother came through it. He paid the devastation to Batuuli’s odds and ends an inquisitive glance before his gaze lit on Lan.

“Ah,” he said, and in that one word was whole volumes of smirking, pornographic prose.

Lan did not back away as he came for her. It was a mistake. Not content merely to loom over her, he unexpectedly seized her in his arms and swung her around, loudly and melodiously humming. There was nothing to catch herself on, nothing to anchor herself to but the dead man who had swept her into this unwanted dance. Stumbling and whirling, she struggled to free herself as he twirled with her too fast and too wild, until he came to a sudden, disorienting stop and pulled her right up close to his mouth.

She thought he was going to kiss her, so she slapped out at him with an angry caw. He caught her hand without looking at it. His eyes never left hers. They were also smiling.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.

“Lord Solveig.”

“Lord Solveig,” he agreed and twirled her through another short set of spins, this time dipping her backwards over his arm almost to the floor. “I heard there was a delivery for me yesterday,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “One I don’t recall ordering.” His head tipped, showing her the sly, sidelong smile of a man who knew the answer but was inviting the lie anyway. “Was that you?”

His eyes actually sparkled. Sparkled! They were blue, she realized, and it unnerved her because the only boy whose eyes she’d ever noticed before was Eithon’s. His were also blue, but these were bluer.

Flustered, Lan shook her head.

“Oo, you’re a liar, too!” he said admiringly and spun her back up onto her feet, letting go of her right at the perfect moment to send her crashing into a flayed pikeman. He and Lan screamed together, but Solveig merely strolled over to a bowl of grapes and plucked one. “You won’t last long with that attitude. Father hates liars.”

“He used to cut out their tongues or make them swallow coals,” Batuuli remarked, watching Lan try to right herself without touching the pikeman or the pedestal where he was fixed, “but these days, he just impales them. There used to be more…I don’t know…poetic symmetry to his punishments. Now, it’s like he’s just going through the motions.”

“Poor man. He needs cheering up. Although,” he mused, running a critical eye over Lan, “I’m not at all certain this is how to go about it. I enjoy slumming in the gutter as much as the next man, but she looks like a pig-farmer.”

“Peaches,” Batuuli corrected as Lan bristled.

“Ah yes, I recall now.” He plucked at a hank of her hair, winding it around his finger and shaking his head. “I’ve known softer hair on a horse’s tail. And the smell…” He leaned close for a whiff and straightened again, wincing. “How can he stand to touch you?”

“I don’t think he has yet,” Batuuli said, adding with an arched eyebrow, “He expects me to prepare her for him.”

“Does he? That’s new.” Solveig walked a circle around Lan, inspecting the curves of her body. “Well, one never knows. Diamond in the rough and all that. If you’re very opposed to the task, dear sister, I’ll be happy to take charge of her.”

“I’m tempted to let you. That would teach him.”

“I could make a day of it,” Solveig mused, now behind Lan where she could not see his leer, but making certain she could hear it. “It’s been years since I last stole one of Father’s pretty ponies from his stable. The little French girl, you know the one.”

“Mmm.”

“I seduced her,” Solveig confided, coming round again to smile at Lan. “I was a month seducing her, in fact. Little glances, little smiles. Love notes, you know the sort…your eyes, your lips, your creamy bosom in the crude grip of a monster. She flitted about the palace, meeting me in shadowed rooms, stealing cold kisses before going to his bed.”

“Father was so confused,” Batuuli said. “He simply could not understand how she could seem to seek his company so eagerly, yet endure his embrace so reluctantly.”

“But of course, it was my company she was after,” Solveig said with a modest bow. “And I made sure to seldom be found save in my father’s presence, so the more I won her to my side, the more Father would think he was winning her to his. And she had to let him think so, for fear he’d put her aside.”

“And you,” Batuuli said with smiling rebuke. “You let her think you so conflicted!”

“How could I betray my loving father with his own courtesan?” Solveig demanded, then tipped a wink at Lan. “Half the fun of seducing her was making her think she was seducing me.”

Batuuli tsked. “And you let her.”

“Of course I let her! I waylaid her on her unhappy walk to my father’s chambers and, overcome with furious passion, whisked her away to my own. She trusted me,” he said, laughing. “Ah, blind, stupid love! She had no fear. The apparatuses we of the masculine gender are forced to use to mock the procreative act can be so intimidating—”

“And deadly,” Batuuli interrupted.

“And deadly,” he agreed. “Especially those of my collection, but she had no fear. Like you,” he told Lan, reaching up to tickle her chin. “But I broke her, piece by piece. By the end, she wasn’t even crying. She just lay there, letting me pose her however I pleased, and waited for it to be over. I left her, bound and splayed, and let Father know where he could find her.”

“What happened to her?” Lan asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Father cleaned her up and got rid of her, I suppose. And if you’re wondering, no, he never said anything about it to me.” He tried for a dramatic scowl, but there was too much real frustration in it to pull off the cavalier attitude he affected. “There is no punishment quite so effective as his enduring forgiveness. Ah, well. Dear sister! Another delightful visit, as ever.” He went over to clasp her hands and kiss her in a distinctly unbrotherly fashion.

That they were playing up to make Lan uncomfortable was obvious, but it was also successful. She found herself staring at the wallpaper and shutting her ears to the wet sounds they were making, reminding herself that they probably weren’t really related. And anyway, they were dead. The dead had their own idea of morality.

“And you.” Solveig returned to pat Lan’s hip and gave her ass a friendly squeeze. “Adieu for now, but you came here as my property, dear thing, and I will be exercising my rights of ownership just as soon as I decide when and how I want him to find you.”

With that, he left, which Lan knew mostly by the sound of the door opening and closing. When she looked back, Batuuli had draped herself—or had been draped—across a settee and was gazing up at the ceiling. The top of her flowing gown had been pulled astray, exposing her left breast. The nipple was small and pointed and still wet from Solveig’s mouth. She looked like a painting of herself, the kind that ought to have a peacock in the window behind her or maybe a panther lying at her feet.

Minutes passed, uninterrupted by anything but the occasional low moan from a pikeman.

“What do you want me to do?” Lan asked finally.

Batuuli lay a hand over her eyes and delicately massaged.

Lan’s temper slipped a notch. “You know, this may shock you, but I don’t want to be here either.”

“Then go. I shan’t chase after you. Go to my father just as you are. Do you think he will have you anyway? Honestly now, do you think he should?” Batuuli waited, then sat up suddenly and said, “Do you?” in a voice like steel. “Do you think, because he is what he is, that he deserves no better than a filthy bag of rags like you?”

“No.”

“But that is just what you say when you offer up your unwashed body to him, who is lord over all the living and the dead. You say he is not deserving of even the smallest effort or consideration. You say it is you who condescends to rut with him, to grace his bed with your presence, and he should be grateful. Isn’t that so?”

“No.”

“No? No, did you say? But you don’t want to be here! And certainly, you don’t have to be here, so get out, warmblood! Get out and go to him!”

Batuuli stared her down from the settee. Lan dropped her eyes.

“Ask me to allow you to stay.”

“Please let me—”

“Ask me to prepare you for Father’s bed.”

“Please prepare—”

“Tell me you want to be my father’s whore.”

Lan’s jaw clenched.

Batuuli waited, then wordlessly got up and opened the door to the hall.

“I want to be his whore.”

“Louder.”

Lan could see a servant busily cleaning the windows and two pikemen on patrol. Batuuli could see them too, and as Lan hesitated, she calmly said, “I said, louder. When he has you, he’ll have you whenever and wherever the urge takes him. It will not serve you to be shy. He’ll have you in the dining hall before the whole of his court, if he wishes, and he will want to hear you moan and feel you suck at him with the same enthusiasm as if you were couched in private shadows.”

“I want to be his whore!”

The servant looked around, looked right at her.

“And he sent you to me because?” Batuuli prompted.

“I…need to wash.”

“Which makes you?”

Heat fanned up Lan’s cheeks. “A dirty whore.”

“Louder.”

“I’m a dirty whore!”

Batuuli shut the door and leaned against it. “So much for human defiance. Tell me again that you don’t want to be here and please believe, I will see you gone. ‘This may shock you,’” she mimicked, exaggerating Lan’s northland accent and giving her words an oafish lilt. “Shock me? Nothing shocks me anymore. You all come tossing your manes and stamping your hooves and you all leave well-saddled. I have seen your kind in droves.”

Crooking a finger for Lan to follow, she went to the other door and opened it. The room beyond was even bigger and brighter than the first, with her handmaidens and her courtiers frozen in their arrangements as they waited on her return.

“Take this and have it cleaned,” Batuuli ordered, waving in Lan’s direction.

“Yes, my lady.” Soft, cool hands gripped Lan’s arms, as impersonal and immovable as any guard’s. “Shall I have the clothes laundered?”

“Are those clothes?” one of the courtiers inquired, wafting a perfumed handkerchief beneath his nose.

“In the interests of public sanitation, they ought to be burnt,” another drawled.

“Insult my father’s playthings at your peril,” Lady Batuuli said coolly. “Do not imagine your words will be kept in confidence just for speaking them here. I have no loyal servants. They are all his.”

Lan’s footsteps as she was led away were uncomfortably loud in the silence that followed, but before she was even out of the room, Lady Batuuli broke it again.

“Get out, all of you. Simpering fools. Magpies. Get out! No, not you!” she snapped as the handmaidens holding Lan released her and began to bow away. “You get about your work.”

Lan was taken to a great white room, whiter than anything she’d ever seen before, whiter even than fresh snow, but it was a cold whiteness rather than a clean one. Opulent, of course, all crystals and vases and glittering edges, but strange and untouchable. Her eye could not seem to find a lighting place until she turned and unexpectedly met with a mirror hung in three panels on the wall. Real mirrors and not just shiny metal, with white and gold etching all around their edges to form a single picture in three parts of a river with trees and deer. In them, Lan saw herself so vividly that, even knowing it was a mirror, she initially thought she was looking at another person.

She saw a woman, one so much older than she was, a woman with only the most surface resemblance to herself. Dirty brown hair that would wash out to a deep honey color if it was ever washed; sunken eyes that could be green or blue depending on where she was (in this white room lit with electric lights, they were grey); a pale, fine-boned face with smudges of dirt to add unneeded depth to her high cheekbones and wind-chapped patches to give her color. It might have been a pretty face in another time and place. Here in Haven, it was the very definition of drab and Lan found her reflection’s stare too direct, too knowing, to meet for long.

She could not guess the purpose of the room, except maybe just to look pretty, which, given that this was Azrael’s palace, was not out of the question, but she must have been brought here for a better reason than just to see it. There was a deep depression in one corner, the most recognizable of the room’s features, and it was there that Lan was aimed, but it was not until one of the handmaidens started water flowing that she truly understood. She was to be bathed. Not just scrubbed off or given a basin to wash in, but bathed, and if that were not frivolous enough, this entire room had been built solely to house the bath.

“One would think I had just shown you my father’s killing garden, the way you look.” Lady Batuuli moved past her to sit on a padded bench by the wall. “Is it not exquisite? Resplendent? Inspiring? Come now, give me a superlative I’ve not heard and you shall have a biscuit.”

“It’s a waste.”

“It is indeed. Such a pragmatic mind you have to appreciate that.” Lady Batuuli put out her hand. A fluted glass of wine was placed in it. She sipped once, then opened her hand and let the glass fall, shatter, and stain the whiteness of this room with a spreading pool of blood-red wine. “I’ve come to think of it as my father’s vanity given physical dimensions,” she said as her handmaidens divided—some to continue preparing Lan and the rest to clean away the wine and broken glass. “He’s made us all his mirrors in Haven. And his masks. But it is rather a rude observation, so you shall not have a biscuit after all.”

Lan turned away to watch the bath fill.

“I suppose the more civilized flourishes are rather overwhelming to one of your upbringing, but you might at least pretend indifference, for my sake. You can’t imagine how galling it is to see you simple folk stand in surroundings such as these and gape at a hot water faucet. That’s enough,” Batuuli said with a wave. “Undress her.”

One handmaiden halted the flow of water as magically as it had started and two others stepped up immediately.

Lan backed away fast, clutching at her shirt-front with both hands. “I don’t need help!”

Batuuli sighed and said, “If she won’t remove them, cut them off.”

“You can’t cut off my clothes!”

“Your clothes?” Batuuli tipped her head in what could only be an acid imitation of her father. “I was talking about your hands.”

Lan was reasonably sure she didn’t mean that…but she let go of her shirt and let the others undress her.

Batuuli deliberately lowered her gaze and studied Lan’s naked body as it was exposed. Her lips pursed. “Truly, my father’s standards are not what they once were…and they were never all that high to begin with. What do you suppose he sees in you?”

“Sex,” Lan said through clenched jaws.

“No, no. There are far more attractive options…shall we say, open?…to him. He may not be very discriminating, but he doesn’t want for a whore when the mood falls over him. There must be dozens of them waiting on his whim here in Haven, hundreds who come begging at the wall every year. He has his pick of holes to plumb, so there must be something about yours that appeals to him. You can get rid of those,” she told the handmaiden holding Lan’s clothes.

“What am I supposed to wear then?”

“Oh, I’m apparently happy to find something appropriately prurient for you. Or rather, Ariel is. Go on,” she said, waving, and one of her handmaidens went. “You needn’t fear being forced to go naked through the halls, assuming you stay on for any length of time. My father likes to dress his dolls.”

Lan tried hard not to react to that—it was just a word, wasn’t it? Words didn’t matter—but she must have because Batuuli’s smile grew teeth.

“And we all indulge my father’s preferences, even if we don’t always dare to look directly at them. Not that I’m an expert on his more libidinous fancies. I dare say you’ll be able to inform me on that subject soon enough, but for now, it is enough for both of us to know only that he would like you clean.” She gestured invitingly at the bath.

Lan looked at it. It was more clean water than she’d ever seen in one place, enough to buy all the peaches in Norwood…and all its people besides.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Batuuli signal her handmaidens, but she didn’t wait for them to force her into the bath. She walked in on her own. It was warm, uncomfortably so. That was okay. It should hurt a little. It should burn. Lan stood and watched her skin turn a scalded pink with a feeling that was almost pride, at least until the handmaidens stepped down into the bath with her. Also naked but impervious to the heat, they scooped up water in pitchers that probably were only ever used for this purpose and poured it out again over her head, her back, her breasts. ‘No one will ever drink this water now,’ she thought, watching the water discolor around her, and then, even more unsettled, thought, ‘This water was never for drinking.’

“You’re not enjoying this,” Lady Batuuli observed.

“I’m not used to it.”

“They’re never used to it, the warmbloods he favors, however briefly, although they always try to pretend otherwise. I’ve seen hundreds of them by now, in all their paints and costumes, laughing along with those who laugh at them. You’re the first I’ve seen who looks as if she knows she’s being mocked,” she added in a musing way. “But then, you’re the first I’ve ever had to prepare for him. Perhaps they’ve all shown their doubts when they’re naked and vulnerable.”

Now sponges were brought, lightly rubbed along Lan’s limbs, and where they passed, they left an unpleasant slick of soft, fragrant foam. Soap? Maybe, but nothing like the cakes of soap in Norwood, made from wood ashes and rendered fat, that left the skin it abraded chapped and tender…and not very clean, either.

“Why did he send you to me?” Lady Batuuli asked. “Did he tell you?”

“Only that he thought it would amuse you.”

“Amuse me? What does he imagine I’ll do with you? Surely he would have sent you to my brother if he thought you needed training.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re hardly the best judge. Serafina there—” One of the handmaidens dipped an uncertain bow in answer to Lady Batuuli’s impatient wave. “—thinks she has a clever tongue for woman’s pleasures, but even at her best, she’s tedious and distracting…and I am rarely so fortunate as to have her best.”

The handmaiden said nothing, but her hands clenched as she scrubbed Lan’s thigh.

“You may think me a jade, like my dear brother, but I’m not. I’m practically an ascetic.” Lady Batuuli lay down on the bench, lacing her hands over her flat belly and studying the ceiling. “I can prove it, if you like.”

“That you’re an ascetic?”

“That Serafina licks quim rather less well than a donkey might. And after all, you should be washed everywhere.”

“No. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Batuuli mimicked. “Such manners. ‘Lord Azrael,’ you called him. Please and thank you and all the while demanding redress to your mortal outrage.” She turned her head to look at Lan, smirking. “You don’t really think he’ll give in, do you?”

“He hasn’t thrown me out.”

“And you think that means what, exactly?” Batuuli looked back at the ceiling. “He will never give you what you want. Never. But he will let you think you can convince him for as long as you can bear his weight upon your back. And afterwards, why, you’ll always have a place in Haven. He throws none of his toys away while there’s still some fun to be had from them. And he’s not a jade either.” She was quiet for a while, then said, softly, “He savors his amusements.”

The handmaidens drained the bath, but kept her standing in its center so they could cover her body with sticky paper and rip it off again in strips, beginning at her ankles and working their way up. They took away more than just the paper, Lan saw, leaving her legs as hairless and smooth as a child’s. They didn’t stop at her thighs, either, but positioned her with her legs wide apart to get at her pubis also, then her underarms and finally even her forearms, which was embarrassingly unnecessary in Lan’s opinion, since the few hairs there were not at all obvious to the eye. She thought it was over when they put the papers and sticky-pot away, but they only ran a fresh bath. This time, Lan was forced to sit, submerged to her neck, while her hair was carefully cleaned and combed. Lan kept it sensibly short and wouldn’t have thought it needed more than a pull or two on each side, but it still took two handmaidens and a ritual procession of soaps, cremes and oils, each of which had to be worked in just so before being rinsed entirely away. All this long while, Lady Batuuli lay motionless, like a corpse laid out for burial, back when people still did that sort of thing. The quiet, the whiteness and the water all combined to gnaw at Lan until she just had to say something, even something stupid, just to end it.

“Would he grant you a request, if you made one?”

All six handmaidens stopped for a moment to stare at her, but Lady Batuuli merely said, “Perhaps,” in that same low, unmoving way. “But take no hope from that, for I will not ask him anything. Not even my own favors and never yours.”

“Why not?”

“I have nothing of my own in this life. Not my home, my family, not even my name…only my hate. And if that is to be my only possession, he can have it, as I am his possession. He can have it all and I hope he chokes on every swallow. Tell me…” Batuuli rolled onto her side, reaching down to trail her hand along the bath’s lip, testing the warmth of the water. “Does he know I hate him?”

“Yes.”

“How fearless you must be,” Batuuli remarked. “Not a quality I imagine would attract him. So he knows I hate him…and still he keeps me. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You answer like one of my servants now. Not so fearless.”

“He loves his Children.”

“Ha! A thousand lies there are in those four words! Do you believe it? Truly?”

“Yes.”

Batuuli’s twisted smile faded into a frown. She sat up, her fingers curled around the edge of her bench until the knuckles paled. “Then you are a fool. He loves nothing. It was only his whim that raised us back to this…this thing that is not life…and if I understood what it was that made him choose me, I would change it, destroy it, force him to send me back into the darkness from which he stole me.”

Lan opened her mouth, but one of the handmaidens chose that moment to pour water over her head and by the time she’d finished spitting it out and clearing her eyes, she knew better than to say what she’d been thinking.

Batuuli was watching. Her eyes were half-closed, which made them seem as if they had no whites at all, were only empty sockets. “You were about to mention my looks, I think,” she murmured. “That he chose me for my beauty. I believe I saw the word obviously hovering about your head.”

Lan shrugged and admitted it with a nod.

“Am I very beautiful then?”

Her handmaidens murmured appreciative affirmation, but Lan only said, puzzled, “You know you are.”

“Yes. I do. And I know that I could mar this face until I was forced to go, as he does, masked. But to what possible end? I could make myself a grotesque, a gargoyle…and he would only mend me and go on…as if I had done nothing.”

“What do you mean, mend you?”

“Just what I say. Dead flesh is no more than clay in Father’s hands. With a touch, he can take away even the worst of wounds.” Batuuli rolled her gaze toward Lan and smiled. “So why, you wonder, does he choose to wear his own in so dramatic a fashion? But he is not dead. I don’t know what he is, but he’s not dead. He has no choice but to live with his scars. It upsets him,” she added with bitter pleasure. “Sometimes I think I should cut myself, just to see what it would do to him. Do you know Tehya?”

“I saw her.”

“And there is a difference, isn’t there? If it comes to that, I don’t suppose anyone knows Tehya. Anyway, she mutilates herself now and then,” Batuuli said with a wave to dismiss her other words. “But he mends her. And she knows he will, so I don’t know why she does it. It isn’t for pleasure and it isn’t out of loathing. It’s almost…almost a kind of speech with her. As if she’s saying something only he can hear, except she does it with knives instead of words.”

“Is she mad?” Lan asked, thinking of the woman she’d seen alone at her table in the dining hall, her eerie stillness and piercing stare.

“Oh, we’re all mad here.” Batuuli smiled, glancing over at her, then sighed and shook her head. “Wasted. You can’t even read, can you?”

She said it like it was an accusation, like that was something just anyone should be able to do. “What does that matter?” Lan asked defensively.

“Not a bit, to me. It’s Father who will become bored with you.”

The handmaidens finished with Lan’s hair and stood her up. The bath was drained. A final pitcher water was poured over her, this one shockingly cold, but she was wrapped so quickly in soft cloth afterwards that she didn’t even have time to shiver. She stood and dripped as the handmaidens dried her, her arms out like a scarecrow’s so as not to impede their work. One last pass of a hooked knife took away any errant hair the waxing had missed and then there was lotion to soothe her raw skin. Three pairs of hands moved over her, invading every secret while Batuuli watched.

“Do I look any better?” Lan asked, when the silence and that stare grew too heavy.

Batuuli roused, seemingly sincerely confused. “Than what?”

Lan blushed. “Than I did when I walked in.”

“Oh.” Batuuli looked her over with an arched brow and a dubious frown. “You’ll do for what he wants. I doubt he even cares what you look like. He’s only bathed you to make you grateful.”

“He doesn’t need to do that,” Lan muttered, looking down at herself. She had thought she might see one of those women from the old magazines, pictures of which could still be traded for a bottle of clean water or a bowl of soup, no matter how faded or torn, especially pictures of a body as naked as hers. Instead, she saw a farmer’s body—all weathered skin and muscular limbs, stocky and awkward and banded with sunless white over pink. “I’m grateful enough.”

“So is he, if the truth be known. Oh look, I’ve shocked them,” she said as her handmaidens all glanced at her together. “That doesn’t happen very often anymore. But it’s true, you know. He raised us up to be his children only because he never thought to raise us up to be his whores. Then the war, the hungering dead, his Haven…and that woman. The bloodstains weren’t yet washed from the floors and there she was. ‘Spare me, my lord,’” Batuuli said, now in a piping, lowland voice, “‘and I’ll be yours.’ Ha. Nothing suspicious in that, is there? But he took her. He was trembling when he led her through the gate. Trembling. Can you imagine? How many thousands of years he’s lived, how many ages of the Earth, and never known a woman? God, it must have been like fucking a baboon.”

The three handmaidens withdrew and the other three came forward, each one with a different gown—one black, one blue and one deep red.

“Which one should I wear?” Lan asked.

“I hardly think it matters. You won’t be in it long. He took the first one right there in the foyer—no, not the black, it makes you look like a corpse. He has enough of those to look at—and all of us in the rooms beyond, pretending not to hear him grunting and thumping about. And of course it ended badly,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “He was so eager to get stuck in that he never stopped to think she might have something to stick in him. Not that it did any good. He can’t be killed. In the stories, the ogre always has a weakness, the dragon that one soft scale, but not Father. She did it all for nothing.”

“Why do you hate him?” Lan asked bluntly, lifting her legs one at a time so the shoes that accompanied the dress could be fit, if they could even be called shoes. They were no more than cloth covers for her feet, glittering with golden thread and black crystals, but thin enough that she could feel the grooves between the tiles through them.

“Why should I not?”

“No, really. Look around. He—” Lan sputtered as the blue gown was dropped over her head. When she’d thrashed her arms through the sleeves and could see again, Batuuli was watching her with her beautiful, poisonous smile. “He’s given you everything,” Lan insisted, undaunted. “Do you even know what you have here? Do you have any idea what it’s like outside of Haven?”

“Whatever you think he’s taken from you, he’s taken more from me. Far more.” Batuuli smile thinned, took on edges, but her voice did not reflect them. Her words were soft, like the fabric clinging to Lan’s clean, sweetly-scented body. “I had a life once. A home. Family, friends, maybe lovers. He denied me all. He raised me without memory. He gave me the only name I know, taught me the only languages I speak. It is this creature, this thief of life, I must call father, knowing nothing of what he took from me, only that he took it. Tighter,” she told the handmaiden lacing Lan’s bodice, so that Lan’s next breath was a cough of surprise. “But I did love him once, you know,” Batuuli went on. “Do you know why?”

She was waiting, so Lan had to answer, even if it was just a wild, breathless shake of her head.

“Because I had to. Because he had made himself our whole world and we knew no better. For a time. Tell me, were you happy in Norwood?” she asked. “Were you happy tending your trees in the ruins of the world?”

Lan said nothing. The handmaidens draped her neck with delicate chains and pinned down her unruly hair with glittering combs.

Batuuli nodded as if Lan had answered. “Because you knew no better. It was only after you saw what you had lost that you thought to miss it. Why should it be different for me? Because I have this?” She waved contemptuously at the white room swallowing them. “This fine cage? These beautiful fetters? You think because I have these things, I do not deserve to grieve for what I’ve lost? Or hate him who took it?” Batuuli waited while Lan’s face was painted, then uttered a short, sharp laugh and said, “Well? Answer! Or are you like all my father’s dogs, who must be told what to think?”

“I think you only hate him because he lets you,” said Lan and Batuuli’s smile vanished. “And I think you stay because beneath all that hate, you know you used to love him and of all the things you’ve lost, that’s the thing you miss most. That’s what I think.”

Lady Batuuli’s chin lifted. Gracefully, she rose and came three light, quick steps forward, stopping close enough that they could have kissed. “You can think what you like, but you would do well to mind what you say.” Each word puffed against Lan’s lips; Batuuli’s breath was cold and tasted vaguely of wine. “Your time will come and go, warmblood. I am eternal. And I can make your suffering last years.”

“You asked,” Lan reminded her.

Batuuli’s dead eyes narrowed. A moment later, she smiled. “So I did. But it appears you are ready for my father’s bed, so we really have nothing more to talk about, do we?” Without waiting for an answer, without turning her head, she said, “Celestine.”

A handmaiden fidgeted forward. “My lady.”

“Take my father’s whore wherever it is whores wait until they are summoned for use.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Lady Batuuli swept away, her handmaidens bowing around her. Lan followed, but when she reached the door, caught only a glimpse of Batuuli’s veils as she disappeared deeper into her many rooms. Only the flayed and mutilated pikemen were there to watch Lan pass by and neither of them spoke.

* * *

So it was back to the Red Room to wait. And wait. And wait. There was nothing to do except stare out the window, where she could watch either the bruise-yellow clouds rolling across the sky or the guards patrolling the palace grounds. From her high vantage, she could see all the way to Haven’s high walls, but there was no movement in the distant streets. All the essential work that should have been necessary to keep a city this size alive had been reduced to light maintenance now that the dead had it. Azrael may have his grand feasts, but the rest of Haven’s residents had no need to eat and therefore no need to cook, farm, raise livestock or run markets. Under his rule, there was no trade and so no economy—no corporations, no banks, no future markets to invest in or past yields to analyze. She wasn’t even certain they still used money in Haven. There was no illness; they needed no hospitals. His was the only law; there was no parliament, no barristers, no police. Newspapers and television had limped on for a while after the ascension, but one by one, that had stopped and now there was no radio, no movies, no magazines. Lan wondered if the dead were bored or if they even noticed they had nothing to do. Waiting here, it was all too easy to imagine them, thousands of them, standing motionless in their clean, bright homes, staring out windows or at walls or just into space, passing time without measuring it until they were needed.

She could not be so patient or so still. Pacing like a penned goat that senses slaughter, she went back and forth from the window, where she stood and imagined the non-workings of Haven’s citizens, to the bed, where she forced herself to sit and keep her hands off her dress or her hair. She tried to think about Azrael, to plan out her words or at least decide which of her limited store of sexual favors was likeliest to win his approval, but her thoughts had a way of drifting back to Batuuli’s chambers.

Solveig, dancing her across the floor. His hand squeezing her ass in that smirking way. His sparkling eyes when he’d spoken of the little French girl, the one who thought she was seducing him. The wet mark on Batuuli’s breast. Apparatuses.

She’d heard it said that if you fell in a well and looked up from the very bottom, you could see stars even at high noon. Well, Lan was in so far over her head that she couldn’t even see the stars.

She had left Norwood with the single thought of coming here, but beyond meeting him and making her small stand, she had no further plan. She knew he’d never let the Eaters die. If she hadn’t known it when she left Norwood (but she had), she’d known from the moment she first stood in his hall and felt his inhuman gaze move over her. Dollying for him only prolonged the inevitable. He would toy with her for as long as it amused him and then it would be over, nothing ended but her last hope, nothing changed.

She cried. A little. Then she stopped because she didn’t want her eyes to be red and swollen when he sent for her. And then she went back to the window because, really, what else was there to do?

The shadows lengthened. The day began to fail. Haven’s lights came on in gradual, glittering waves, but not in the Red Room. As it grew darker, the cold came on stronger and Lan’s dress was no proof against it. She walked for warmth, hugging herself in a futile effort to hide from the wind that blew through the window and under her thin skirt. Her freshly-shaven skin tingled at each gust, over-sensitive to the cold. It made her wonder if she would feel his cold as intensely.

The chill that swept through her then had nothing to do with the wind.

At last, she heard boots on the stairs. Lan groped her way to the door in near-total blackness, thereby earning herself a stubbed toe when the guard flung it open on her useless pretty shoes, so that her greeting was an explosive, “Bugger-fuck!”

The guard startled, then pinched his pretty lips together and stood aside.

“What?” Lan snapped, limping past him with a glower. “You already knew I was vulgar.”

He did not reply.

Down they went and out into the lamplit halls of the palace, where Lan was confronted almost at once by her reflection in a pane of glass.

She had known, of course, that the bodice was tight—during the long hours of her confinement, her eyes had often traveled down and with some awe over the bared swells of her breasts, made mountainous in this costume—but she had somehow not realized how her figure would be exaggerated, made voluptuous and even wanton. Her skirts clung to every curve, accentuating the fullness of her hips and thighs with shimmers and shadow. The corset came to a point in front, like a crude arrow pointing between her legs. She had been less naked than this in the bath.

The guard gave her a none-too-gentle shove, putting an abrupt end to her fascination. She walked, dazed, stealing glances in every window, mirror and polished surface they passed, as if to reassure herself that, yes, that woman was still her. That painted woman. That bare-legged, nearly bare-breasted woman.

That stranger.

Although she had now been to his dining hall twice, she nearly walked right past it, so absorbed was she in catching these intermittent and somehow reproving glances of herself. Her guard had to catch her arm, which was unexpected enough that, although he surely only meant to give her another terse shove toward the door, he instead hurled her through it. She might have been able to catch herself under ordinary circumstances, but the long skirt of her dress, her soft slippers and that very smooth formal floor conspired to send her crashing to the ground and over it until she banged into someone’s chair and lay in a heap with her dress hiked up around her sprawling legs and the wind knocked out of her.

There weren’t many to witness this demonstration of her grace; once again, the banquet tables were empty apart from Azrael himself, although the half-cleared leavings of a sumptuous feast suggested the guests had only just left. There were servants in abundance along the walls, some of whom had fluttered forward as if to help Lan up, only to retake their positions, casting uncertain glances at the throne.

Azrael himself had stood, either to greet her or in surprise at her violent entry. Now he seated himself again and pointed a casual claw at Lan’s escort. “Impale him.”

“My lord,” the guard stammered, even as other guards stepped up to take his pike. “Forgive…I didn’t—”

“I tripped,” said Lan, struggling to right herself. The corset would not allow her to bend, making even the simple act of standing into an awkward mess. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“If I have compassion, child, surely it cannot be in such abundance that you can beg it on behalf of the living and the dead.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Did you?” Azrael countered. “Did I? Fate strikes where it wills, not where it is deserved.”

“You’re not fate!”

Azrael drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table as the guard was pulled toward the door, then raised a hand to halt them. “So be it,” he said. “If it moves you to be appreciative, so I am moved to be merciful.”

When his hand dropped again, so did the guard, dead before he smacked into the ground.

But of course, thought Lan, flustered, he had been dead to begin with. She looked at him, at Azrael—Devil, God, Death—and wondered when and how she could have forgotten what he was.

He caught her staring and smiled behind his mask. “Such is my mercy. Come. Join me.”

A soft scraping sound behind her drew her eye. The nearest servants had left off clearing the tables of dirty plates and come to clear the body instead. His boots were dragging on the tiles. Azrael’s steward rushed over and knelt down to remove them. So they wouldn’t scuff the floor, she thought dimly, but her eyes remained fixed on the body’s bare feet. She could see them two ways: knobby and soft and pink, as they were in front of her now, and as she remembered them, scratched and muddy.

For a moment, she smelled smoke and peaches…

“Lan.”

She looked around. Azrael had stood and was holding up his hand again, ready to signal a guard if she needed to be carried to him.

“Are we going to do it here?” she asked, walking toward him. The first step was the hardest, but it got easier when she heard the door close and knew the bare-footed body was gone.

“It?”

“You know what I mean.”

He studied her a moment, then uttered a short laugh and cut his hand through the air in negation. “It,” he said pointedly, “will wait for my private chambers. Eat with me.”

“Again?”

“There was a time not too long distant that two meals each day would have been thought too few. And Norwood’s harvests this past year would not seem to have been bountiful,” he added, running an eye over her.

“It’s the corset. I’m not really this skinny.”

“I have never known so contentious a peacemaker.” He beckoned her toward the chair where she’d sat that morning. A clean plate awaited her there, along with several platters heaped with food and a full bottle of wine. When she picked the latter up and looked at him, he shrugged. “Even my most willing concubines prefer to soften their first night with me. Drink. I’m not offended.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I get stupid when I drink.” Lan put the bottle down, then picked up the chair. It was a lot heavier than she thought it would be. As Azrael watched, his head tipped and eyes glinting, she dragged it with her to the dais and up the short stair to push it against the imperial table opposite his own throne. She sat, a little out of breath, pretending she could not hear the running boots of at least a dozen pikemen behind her.

“Contentious,” said Azrael, smiling. “And presumptive.”

“It’s so we can talk.”

“Ah.” He waved the pikemen back and beckoned to a servant, who came to move the many dishes that made up Lan’s meal.

“That isn’t necessary. We can share a plate, can’t we?”

“It might be poisoned,” he said, with obvious amusement. “Attempts are made, from time to time.”

“I trust you to raise me up again if I die, at least long enough to finish the audience you promised me.”

“Now I must have honor as well as mercy? Is there no end to your high esteem of me? Go on, then. Eat with me.”

“What is this?” asked Lan, tearing some meat off the carved breast of some kind of bird. “Chicken?”

“Hawk.”

“I didn’t think you could eat hawk.”

“You can eat anything.” He watched her chew and swallow, his eyes glowing dimly in the shadows of his mask’s sockets, then picked up one of the forks flanking his plate and held it out to her. “And do you favor hawk, now that you’ve had it?”

“That’s a joke, right? How do you have a favorite food?”

He smiled.

“That’s like…like having favorite air. It seems silly to use this thing,” she added, frowning at the fork. “Why do I have to gaff my food when I can just pick it up and eat normally?”

“The idea is to keep your hands clean.”

“I can just—” Lan started to wipe her fingers on her jeans, only to remember the fine dress she was instead wearing. “I can wash my hands,” she said after some thought. “Afterwards.”

“Could you?” His smile broadened, a smile that told her he could read just how it had felt to sit in Batuuli’s bath and know that now no one would ever drink any of that clean water.

“I could get used to it, I suppose,” mumbled Lan, making a stab at a grape. The points of the fork just slipped off.

“How did you find my daughter?”

Lan shrugged, still fighting fruit. “The guards took me right to her.”

“Her company, I mean.”

“Oh.” She had to think awhile before she could fit together an answer that was both tactful and true. “She received me.”

“And my son? I’m told he was visiting,” he said, catching her wary glance.

“All right, I suppose. They have a…a close relationship, don’t they?”

“They used to,” he said noncommittally. “Now it is just one more means by which to provoke me. It doesn’t. Indeed, if I thought they genuinely cared for one another, I would give them my blessing, but it is only a mutual hatred expressed with flesh.” His claw tapped at the tabletop three times, slowly, as he watched her. “They may seek to involve you in their games.”

“Yeah, I heard about the last girl they involved.”

His eyes flickered. “He told you.”

“He laughed about it.”

Azrael looked away.

“What happened to her?” Lan asked.

“No more than what she wished to happen. I will speak no more of such bleak matters in such winning company.” He waved the wine-girl over and took the bottle from her, filling his own cup, drinking it off, and filling it again. “How like you your gown?”

Lan thought, ‘It’s cold and it makes me look like a whore. Or a peacock. A peacock-whore, maybe. I can barely breathe in this corset and the shoes are too slippery. The sleeves are scratchy and it pinches under my arms.’

Lan said, “Fine, I guess.”

“Faint praise,” he mused. “You don’t like it.”

“It’s fine,” she insisted, trying once again to get a damned grape on her fork. “How do you like it? Seems like that’s the real question.”

“And the color?”

Lan succeeded in threading a grape stem between the points of her fork, plucking it from the bunch with careful twist, but it immediately fell and bounced away off the edge of the table. “What about it?”

“Do you favor the color?”

“Are you teasing me?” Her frustration with the fork and the fruits sharpened her tone more than was perhaps wise. “How the hell do you have a favorite color?”

He rolled his shoulders and plucked a grape himself…using his fingers. “I think it suits you.”

Lan gave up on the grapes and stabbed an apple. “It may be pretty, but the cloth is too thin.”

“It isn’t meant for warmth.”

“Then why make a dress out of it?”

“For the pleasure of taking it off. I have removed that gown from several women in the past,” he added, knuckling idly through a tray of sweetmeats for one worthy of his appetite. “But never with such anticipation as I confess I feel seeing it now on you.”

She spared him a quizzical glance as she sawed her apple into clumsy wedges. “You say that like it’s a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.”

“Even though it just compared me to all your other dollies?”

“Not all, merely those who have worn that particular gown. And I did set you above them in the comparison, did I not?”

“Which only means you’re going to set the next girl who wears it above me.”

He watched her eat, his thumbclaw scratching slowly back and forth along the rim of his cup. “You should wear jewels,” he said at last.

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll wear nothing but a dog collar and a diamond tiara if that’s what you want, but I’m not going to come all over giggly just because you offer.”

“Ah. And after all I’ve done to foster trust between us.”

“Like send Revenants to my home and put me in chains in your meditation garden.”

“You wore them well.” He tipped his cup toward her, one glowing eye flickering in a wink. “That was also a compliment.”

Her lips twitched, wanting to smile in spite of herself. She turned her attention to cutting her apple apart with knife and fork, forcing herself to imagine the clear juice that welled up around the blade as blood. Norwood had bled. The whole world had bled for Azrael. He was not charming and this was not dinner. He was the enemy and this was battle.

“You promised me an audience,” she said, hacking the meat of her apple into smaller and smaller bits.

“And you’ll have it when it’s paid for. Until then, no more talk of the hungering dead. It dampens the romantic mood.”

“Is that what you think this is? A romance?”

“I concede the point,” he said wryly, “but it is no greater farce than to think it an endeavor to end war, surely.”

“Is that what we’re doing tonight? Competing to see who’s the most deluded?”

“Not all, I trust.” He let his gaze wander with obvious relish over the front of her dress. “That would be a low trick after whetting my appetite so with your splendid entrance.”

She thought he was only making fun of her for falling down, and then she remembered the position in which she’d ultimately fetched up—legs spread wide and skirts hiked up to her waist.

As if her thoughts were an old movie playing in the air above her head for him to see, Azrael’s smile broadened into a grin, showing a hint of sharp teeth behind the slit of his mask’s mouth.

“It was an accident,” she mumbled, blushing and furious with herself for letting him see her blush.

“I believe it and yet, a pity it is true, for if it had been a plot, it would have been a winning one. And what more fitting way to begin a meal than with an appetizer? I can hardly eat for thoughts of the final course.”

“Because you caught me with my skirt up? Have I got something you’ve never seen before, after all your other dollies?”

“It is not what I saw but what I did not see that intrigues me most.”

Lan clenched her jaw and stabbed at her apple. “They didn’t give me knickers or I would have worn them.”

“You mistake me.”

“What then?”

“Artifice.”

“I don’t know what that word means.”

“No matter. Eat. Or shall we adjourn to satiate our other appetites?”

“Is that sex talk?” she asked uncertainly.

“It is.”

“Why don’t you just say sex then? It’s always chalice and appetite and artifice with you. I never know what the hell you’re saying.”

“Are you resigned to fuck me?”

She looked at him, startled.

He gazed evenly back at her, cup in hand, head slightly at an angle. “Was that not plain enough?”

“I said I would. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“For an audience. And when it proves fruitless, will you elect once more to leave me wanting? For as much as I enjoy our little talks, I will not content myself with talk alone tonight. Neither will I be made a brute in my own bedchamber. What is your intent?”

“To pay for my audience and then get one.”

“Hm.” He brooded over his cup, then set it aside. “You know my answer already. Perhaps we would both be better served to end this now.”

“Perhaps. You have lots of willing women, I hear. And I have a long road back to Norwood.” Lan picked up her fork and bit off another chunk of apple.

He watched her eat, frowning. “We’ll talk,” he said at length. “But find you some other subject than my hungering dead or the war your kind began.”

“Another subject…Like you?”

“I require no adulation.”

“I don’t know what that means. Can we talk about you?”

“My tyranny?” he guessed, his eyes narrowing.

“Just you. Where are you from?”

His mask showed her no emotion, only stillness and the steady glow of his stare. “Originally?”

She shrugged and nodded.

“Why?”

“I just want to know you, that’s all.”

His jaw clenched, but he said, “The land of my birth had no name. Nor did my mother’s people. If you ask where I began, I can tell you only south of here.”

“How far south? Someone showed me the ocean once. On a map. Did you have to cross it to get here?”

“I did, although I’m not certain where the ocean lay in the days of my youth. The land was different then.”

“When was that?”

“Before Time was,” he said, stabbing the words at her like a knife. “Have you any other pointless questions?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

The hard line of his mouth went crooked. He broke a loaf of herbed bread and gave her half. “White.”

She started to take a bite, then gave in with a little shiver of excess and buttered it first. “And when did you first know you had power over the dead?”

He glanced at her and away, immediately absorbed in his meal. “I told you of my first memory. It was then.”

“Does it bother you to talk about it?”

“I see no reason to talk about it.”

“I see no reason to sit here and stare at each other in silence.”

“Steward!” Azrael bellowed. “Musicians!”

“You make such a point of saying that people judge you without knowing anything about you, but how is anyone supposed to know you if you don’t talk about—”

“Enough!” Throwing the remains of his bread onto the platter, Azrael leaned back and glared at her. “What is this unwise game you play with me? How can you think it will help your cause to stir up the muck of these still memories? I realize you are very new to the diplomat’s arts, but even you must know you would be far better served to incur my favor than my wrath.”

“Would it help if I sat on your lap?”

His eyes flickered, losing much of their piercing intensity. “What?”

“Would you feel better about answering questions if I sat on your lap when I asked them?”

His head tipped back, as if he needed the extra inches to bring her all the way into focus.

“It’s called barter,” she explained. “This is how we buy things in Norwood: in pieces.”

He studied her through narrow eyes for several seconds before moving his throne wordlessly back and slightly spreading his thighs.

Lan rose from her chair and went to his. Taking the hand he offered, she hiked up her long skirts and straddled him. It took some wiggling to get comfortable, settling at last with her skirts rolled up into a cushion between them, but draped long in back, so even if every blank-faced servant in the room knew what she was about under there, at least her bare ass wasn’t on display. “How’s that?” she asked, rocking back and forth to test.

His eyes flickered. “A fair trade. Very fair.”

“Then tell me,” she said.

He put a hand on her hip, starting her in small, slow rolling motions she agreeably continued. “The humans who had been my mother’s people cast us both—her, dead, and I, undying—from a short cliff near to their warren. I recall the wind around me as I fell and the rocks growing huge below me until I broke upon them. I tumbled across the stony drift to fetch up against my dead mother’s belly. These were my first moments and they were all in pain and terror. The heat of that day baked her spilled blood onto my skin. I could smell her flesh rotting, taste it growing sour in my mouth. The dark warmth of her womb which had been all my world was gone. The wet drumming of her heart, the muted lilting of her voice—all lost. Shall it surprise you that I sought comfort?”

He was hardening, the horror of his words notwithstanding. Lan ground gently against him as, behind her, his musicians quietly filed into the room and took up their instruments. The melody they chose was soft and unobtrusive; the low beat that kept their time matched the rhythm of Lan’s hips. It was very distracting.

“How long I lay there, I cannot say,” Azrael murmured, his eyes sliding shut. “The blinding light eventually darkened and with it came the cold and the hungry cries of unknown beasts. All my fear turned to a simple wanting, a silent cry for my mother. I felt it flow out of me, felt it strike and sink deep, and then I felt her shudder beneath me. Her arms rose—” Azrael’s own arms lifted, his hands slipping as light as an errant breeze around her back. “—to embrace me. I did not know that she was dead. I did not care that the milk I suckled from her slack breast was cold and clotted in my mouth. I knew only safety in her touches.”

“How can you remember all this so clearly?”

“Immortality is a curse upon the mind as much as the flesh. I remember all things. There is no part of me that decays.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It is,” he said, still without opening his eyes. “Yet a thousand or ten thousand years hence, I shall remember this as well…how you moved on me…and the warmth of your hand on my shoulder…”

She glanced at her hand, flexing the fingers self-consciously.

“…and it may bring me some echo of pleasure undiminished by time. Even my life is not all pain. When I exhausted the resources of my mother’s dead breast,” he continued, “my hunger and loneliness eventually grew stronger than my fear of the pain I endured in my place of birthing. In the cold and dark of each successive night, I remembered the warmth and light of fire. When it became too terrible to bear, I caused my mother’s flesh to rise and walk.”

“She wasn’t really alive again, was she?” Lan asked, rubbing herself lightly along the full constrained length of him.

“No. Neither was she what you would call an Eater. She was my first, little more than a doll of my infant whims. By the time I had schooled myself well enough that I might have given her a mind, her body had fallen into decay beyond even my power to restore. I remember her with some regret. I would that I could have done better by her. But she is well behind me and you…” One of his hands slipped down to grip her ass, kneading in a way that reminded her disturbingly of Solveig, while the other wedged itself between them, burrowing past the protection of her skirts to pry at his belt buckle. He pulled her close, the edge of his mask’s mouth-slit scraping at her as he nuzzled her neck, working his way hungrily downward. “…you are here. And I can do very well by you.”

She didn’t mean to. She really didn’t. But she froze.

And, after a second or two, so did he.

She felt his breath hot on her throat, made to feel even hotter by the chill radiating from his flesh. She knew she should say something, but the longer the silence lasted, the harder it was to start.

“Later, then,” he said, lifting her off his lap and setting her down—just a bit too hard—on her feet.

“Azrael, it’s not…it’s not you, I swear. It’s just…”

“I know what it is. No matter.” He unbuckled his belt, gesturing to one of the many silent servants lining the walls. “What shall we talk about next? My father? I’ve no idea who he might have been. Or what. If my mother knew, she lost her chance to tell me, so I’m at a loss as to what coin I can use to purchase the next small piece of your compliance. Truthfully, I begin to wonder why I should purchase it at all.”

Lan tugged self-consciously at her skirts as she backed away, unsure where to look as the servant went to her knees before the throne. “It’s just…I’ve never done this before. I mean, sure, this, obviously, but…” She looked up into the crystal lights and down again, taking it all in—every glint of gold and flash of reflected light, the servants, the wine, the throne where the Devil sat, being serviced in a pensive and joyless manner. “Not this.”

“You’ll have to overcome your shyness if you intend to stay,” Azrael said in an unforgiving tone.

“I’m trying.”

“By shrinking from your duties?”

“By getting to know you.”

He didn’t seem to know what to say to that. His gaze dropped, lingering on the bobbing head between his thighs, before his attention returned to his half-finished meal. “Perhaps we should talk about your mother.”

It threw her. Hard.

“Why?”

He looked up, his eyes narrowed and cold. “Is that the way of it? I lay all my secrets bare, you hoard yours? Have I not as much right to know my bedmate as you?”

“So talk about me, not her.”

“Oh.” He propped an elbow on the table and leaned into it. “Oh, but now I think I must. Do you remember her well?”

Lan’s shoulders twitched in a defensive shrug. “She only died a few months ago.”

“Suspicious timing…” Azrael tapped at his cup, then took it up and drank. “And was there some relation between her death and your departure from Norwood?”

“I had no more reason to stay.”

“Did she send you to me?” he asked curiously. “With her last breath, did she bid you leave the squalor of Norwood to seek out the protection of my glorious shadow? Is it possible I knew her?” He reached down to comb his claws once through his servant’s hair as she finished him off and began impersonally to clean him. “Intimately?”

“You killed her.”

“Intimate, indeed. Yet I must repeat, I’ve killed no one in recent years.”

“Your world killed her, your glorious shadow.”

“Ah, well, that is a slightly different matter.” Azrael dismissed his servant with a wave and bound on his loincloth again. “But then, I’ve noticed you are somewhat prone to exaggeration.”

“And you, so dismissive.”

“Modest.” His voice held a smile. “I’m modest. And, as my baser nature is presently satiated, you may as well tell me of your mother. Her terrible youth, a stranger in a dying land, alone and vulnerable. A tragic tale and well-rehearsed, I’m sure. It would be a pity never to find an ear, so eat and tell me of her. Was she pretty?”

“No.”

“You’re baiting me, I think. All children find their mothers pretty.”

“Not mine. She was hard. Scarred.”

“How uncharitable. And untrue, I should think. If you were made at all from your mother’s mold, she must have been fair enough at one time.”

The words ran through her head twice before they came together. “That’s another compliment,” she said, her rising frustration now eclipsed by puzzlement. “Why do you keep complimenting me?”

“Perhaps it amuses me to see you so unmoored by them. Do you much resemble your mother?”

“A little. I don’t know.” She looked down at her platter, trying to remember what her mother looked like enough to compare it to the painted stranger staring up at her. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Look like your mother.”

He managed somehow to shrug with only his eyes. “I did once, particularly about the nose and jaw, but every part of her that ever could have been found in me has gone now. And hers were not, you understand, conventionally attractive features.”

“Everyone thinks their mother is pretty,” she reminded him.

“So I did, once. And given the chance, I think I may have continued to believe so, for all her decay. I have learned to look beneath the skin for beauty.”

She snorted.

He looked at her.

“Your children are awfully pretty,” she told him.

His eyes narrowed behind the mask.

“So are your guards.”

“Hm.”

“And your musicians. And your servants. And your chamberlain. And your ferrymen, for that matter. If you brought the bloke whose job it is to unblock the toilets here, I bet you a year’s labor he’d be pretty.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to distract me.”

Lan picked at her dinner, scowling, then put down her fork and said, “You want to know about my mother? Okay. Here’s everything you need to know about my mother.”

“I’m all attention,” he said, ignoring her to carve into his bird.

“She lost her coat the night she got here.”

She could see him trying not to react to that, but after a few awkward seconds, he looked at her. “There must be more to the tale than that.”

“There is, but if you want to hear it, you have to hear all of it.”

“Have I, indeed?”

“This is a big piece of me,” she told him, erasing his crooked smile. “You want to buy me tonight? Let me say it all. I’ve only got it in me to do it once.”

“It can’t be so precious, surely,” he said after a considering moment. “It isn’t your tale.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s hers. She gave it to me and I’m selling it to you, and if you can’t understand why that makes it worse, then I guess we’re done.” She grabbed up her apple and bit, chewing hard and staring straight ahead.

Azrael watched her eat, his fingers drumming now and then on the edge of the table. “Tell me,” he said at length.

“You interrupt me just once and so help me—”

“I won’t.”

“Fine.” Lan put her apple down and pushed her plate away. It felt slightly obscene to be eating when she said this. She’d been so hungry the night she’d heard it. They all were, except maybe the mayor and his family, but maybe even them. It had been a bad winter, so cold the last ferryman to come through had claimed the Channel was freezing over. The ground had gone too cold, even in the greenhouses, so the peaches were all drawing down. The ones in fruit were bitter; the rest wouldn’t flower. Everyone said the cold wouldn’t last, but the soup got thinner and loaves got smaller and everyone went to bed hungry for all that no one was worried. And lying there in the bed they shared, listening to Baby Ivy crying two beds away, for no reason whatever unless it was just to take a hungry child’s mind off her pinching belly for one night, her mother started to speak, whispering in her ear so no one else could hear, “I was a child…”

“She was a child when she came to this country,” Lan said now. “She didn’t remember how old. Maybe seven. Maybe only five or six. She used to live in a big house, painted grey and white. She said from her bedroom window, she could see the sea, but they never went there that she remembered. Not until the Eaters came. No one knew what happened yet. No one knew it was you. There was a whole ocean between you and my mother’s home, but the dead rose up anyway and started eating people.”

Azrael did not respond.

“They couldn’t get out of the city. All the cars were stuck on the road and so people were driving crazy, trying to get through anyway and crashing their cars and then they’d raise up and so there were Eaters on the road, going car to car and no one could get away. So they couldn’t get out of the city, but the city was even worse. People were shooting Eaters and shooting each other, which only made more Eaters, and buildings were burning and no one even knew why or what had happened. But somehow, someone over there came up with this plan to put all the kids in town that could get to them on a boat and take them to England. Just until whatever was happening was over, because they didn’t think it was happening in England and England was the only country they could think of that was far away and friendly. This was the plan. What kind of plan was that?” Lan asked him. That wasn’t part of the story. She hadn’t really meant to ask, but it came bubbling out of her all the same. “What kind of ass-headed plan…? She had no one, knew no one. Her parents thought they were saving her. Instead, they put her on a boat and sent her right to you. And she was five or six or seven. And she was all alone.”

Azrael said nothing.

“The ocean was cold. That’s all she remembered of the trip across. It took a long time and she mostly stayed in her room with the other kids. Sometimes, they were let out on the deck, but the wind was so cold and sometimes it snowed, so even if they were let out, she mostly stayed in her room. All she had was what she was wearing: her pajamas, her rubber boots, and her coat. There wasn’t time to pack others or even to really get dressed. And it was so cold that she hardly ever took the coat off, even indoors. It was pink, with white fuzz on the edges like fur, but not really. When the boat came close to the shore, they called all the kids up onto the deck. It was dark and it was snowing. All the kids were trying to stand in the middle of other kids because it was warmer there, but my mom was so little, she got shoved to the outside. She was right next to the rails in the very front of the boat. So she saw everything. She could see fires burning in the city, but no lights on. And the boat was going to dock anyway,” said Lan, shaking her head. “How could anyone see that and just dock anyway? How could they not know?”

“What would you have had them do?” Azrael asked quietly. “Sail the Earth forever? Perhaps they were out of food. Perhaps they thought…at least it would end quickly.”

“Nothing ends. That’s the point, isn’t it? They all but fed those kids to your Eaters and, quick or not, that’s a fucking awful way to go.”

He did not answer that.

“It was dark,” said Lan, after a few calming breaths and a drink of water. “But my mother could see shapes moving on the shore. She thought they were people, their new moms and dads, coming to get them. But they didn’t stop when they reached the end of the pier. They fell into the water, she said, and they kept coming until she could see this white, churning wave coming right at them. The boat never even had the chance to dock. The Eaters hit the side of the boat and kept piling up. It wasn’t quick, but it was…inevitable, she called it. Like the sun setting. They piled up higher and came over the rails and suddenly everyone was screaming. The boat kept going. It broke through the pier and crashed into the whatsis, the docking place. The hull stoved in and the boat started to flip over. The waves came over the side and kids were being washed overboard, right into the Eaters in the water. My mother fell too, but a wave picked her up. She grabbed hands with a boy in the water and the wave took them both to the pier. It put her down on top of the boards. It slammed him into the side and crushed him dead. That was how my mother came to England.”

“She lost her coat in the water, one assumes.”

“No, she still had it then. It was a big, puffy coat. She used to say it was what saved her, actually. It was full of air, like a life-vest. Anyway, there was no one left of the crew on the boat. No one to meet them on shore. Eaters bloody everywhere and no one to help. All she could see of the city was burning buildings and the boat sinking off the pier. All she could hear was sirens and screams. The kids all scattered as soon as they reached shore and most of them got taken down by Eaters pretty much right off. My mother was one of a group that climbed in through the window of a dockside warehouse or something. Understand, this place was in sight of the boat she’d come in on. She could have thrown a rock and hit it. But she thought she was safe, like a child who thinks pulling the blankets up over her head at night will keep the monsters out. She slept that night with her hood pulled up, the hood on her coat, for just that reason. It was a big, puffy coat,” Lan said again. “She couldn’t hear through it very well. She never heard the Eater come in through the window.”

Azrael raked his eyes across the table, then stabbed the roasted hawk off its platter and transferred it to his plate. He began to carve it, somewhat forcefully.

“It was only dumb luck it didn’t get her instead of the little girl it did get. It dragged her down and tore her open while she was still screaming and my mom saw her guts coming out. The little girl’s name was Sharon. My mother remembers that because she was wearing a nametag. It said, Hello, my name is Sharon. If I’m alone, please help me find an adult.”

Azrael put down his knife and fork and tore the leg off the hawk with his hands.

“All the other kids ran, but my mom grabbed an axe—don’t ask me what an axe was doing lying around, because I don’t know—and hit him in the back. She severed his spine and no, he didn’t die, but he couldn’t get up either. He lay there and writhed instead, snapping his teeth while Mom tried to drag him off of Sharon. And when she finally rolled him over, Sharon got up. The rest of her guts fell out, but she still got up. Mom had to cut her head off to stop her. Would you like to know how my mother lost her coat?”

“Not especially.”

“She took it off because she couldn’t get the blood out. That’s how young she was—she left behind her only coat just because it got bloody. She’d have slapped me if I’d done that, six years old or not. There’s no excuse for that kind of stupid in this world.”

Azrael ate. His musicians finished their song and began another.

“She got another coat the next night, in some empty house down the street. She ate out of their cupboards and slept in their attics She learned all the ways to get around your benign Eaters and you’re right,” she said, nodding. “They’re not too bright. She lived right there in that town by the sea until summer, all by herself. Five years old, maybe six or seven. She never saw another living person after that first night, so she moved on when the weather warmed up. She scavenged when she could and then she learned how to make weapons and hunt. She learned how to find places to sleep between the towns and how to make them if there weren’t any to find. She learned how to sell her body for a bottle of water. She lived eleven years in the open country before Norwood took her in. Eleven years, alone.”

“A resourceful woman,” he said. “I suppose my hungering dead must have ultimately run her down.”

“No. She was killed for her boots. I was working in the orchards when she went out hunting. I didn’t see it happen, so do you know how I know?”

He tossed the bird’s bones onto the platter and helped himself to a peach.

“When she came back, she was barefoot,” said Lan. The effort of keeping her voice low and even caused it to tremble. She made herself take a few breaths before continuing. The air ached in her lungs, caught like hooks in her throat. “There were leaves and dirt in her hair, all matted in with blood. They’d stabbed her over and over before they cut her throat. Her clothes were…torn…too bad to be worth stealing, but they took her boots and left her there to get up again. They left her there so she had to come back, barefoot in the fucking mud. And she didn’t even know it. She didn’t even know she’d lost her boots.”

“My condolences.” Azrael carved out a slice of peach, but he didn’t eat it. He set it on his plate and carved another. “Yet I would observe here that my Eaters, as you call them, have no use for shoes. I may have robbed your mother of her childhood, however obliquely.” Another slice, uneaten, joined the first. “I may have robbed her of her home and family. I shall even grant that I robbed her of hope and innocence and happiness, as if such are qualities of a world that has never known me.” He carved a third and fourth wedge out of the peach, then put the whole thing down and pushed the plate aside. “But not even by the acts of my hungering dead have I robbed her of life.”

“You ruined her life. You ruined her death.” Tears broke her voice even though they didn’t fall from her eyes. She tried to breathe herself quiet and couldn’t, tried to blink her vision clear and couldn’t do that either. “I couldn’t even bury her. She doesn’t have a grave. They burned her with all the rest of them and I have nothing left. My last memory of my mother is the stink of her smoke.”

“I’ve smelled that smoke,” he remarked, now reaching for his cup. “It is a terrible smell and it does linger.”

“Stop trying to one-up me.”

“I’m not. I’m sympathizing.”

“You…” She fought with it, but the tight heat choking the breath from her body coiled and coiled and suddenly erupted. “You don’t get to sympathize, you son of a bitch! You’re the reason she had to burn! Because she was out there! Because she was dead and walking around and trying to get at us! She was my mother and you turned her into an Eater that someone had to chop up and burn!”

“Someone.” Light reflected in the eye he turned on her, making it glow gold in the shadow of his mask. “But not you.”

She should have known he would ask, but she didn’t. She should have refused to answer, but she didn’t do that either. “I tried,” she said. Two words and they still cracked.

“But…?”

“She was my mother.”

His eyes sparked in the sockets of his mask. “Not anymore.”

“Yes, damn it! Always! That’s what you don’t get! They’re all someone’s mother or brother or friend! They’re all someone that someone else wants to grieve for and can’t! If you were really capable of any kind of feeling—”

He slammed his cup down hard enough to dent it.

“—you’d know that when someone you love dies, you’d do anything, anything, to see them again.” Tears shook free of her voice and trickled down her cheek as she glared at him. “And when we see them, they’re trying to eat us. And that’s your fault. That’s entirely…your…fault.”

The music played. Otherwise, there was silence. At last, Azrael picked up his cup, put it down again without drinking and snapped, “How is it that you have so much more venom for me, a hundred miles from your mother, than for her murderers? Where is your sense of justice?”

“Stopping them only stops them. Stopping you stops all of it.”

“Ah. Well.” He gestured toward his chest. “Stop me, then.”

“I’m trying.”

“By making me angry?” he demanded incredulously.

“By making you feel.”

“Feel what? Pity? For whom? You admit that even though the living rarely venture beyond their town’s walls and so have nothing to do with me, still they revile me for my cruelty! My tyranny!”

“You are cruel!” Lan shouted. “You are a tyrant!”

“How dare you!”

“People starve in Norwood while you waste tables full of food every night on people who don’t even need to eat! You don’t think that’s cruel? You sent an army of Revenants to raze Norwood just because you like peaches and when I begged you for their lives, you threw me in chains for the night! But you don’t call yourself a tyrant? You killed a man for being in the same room when I fell down and called it mercy because you didn’t impale him first! Well, my goodness, you’re just an angel of compassion, aren’t you?!”

“Point,” said Azrael tightly, thrusting up one black-clawed thumb. “My Revenants are under strict orders never to kill unless attacked and they are incapable of disobedience. They razed nothing of Norwood—not a hovel, not a field, not a fence. They were met with resistance and they quelled it. That is all. Point.” His index finger stabbed out. “You did not beg. You said, exactly, ‘Stop. You can’t kill them,’ followed in due course by, ‘Murderer.’ I have no doubt your memory casts you in the part of the noble victim, but you have begged for nothing in my court. You have made demands. Point.” He raised another finger. “I did not kill a man. I let the dead die. And is that not after all why you came seeking me?” Without warning, his hand became a fist and crashed down on the table, upending his cup and collapsing the decorative tower of fruits between them. “If I want her dead, I’ll kill her myself!” he roared. “Get back to your posts or I’ll pin you there and let you rot!”

Lan looked around to see his pikemen retreat across the room. She hadn’t heard them approach this time, but Azrael surely had to have seen them coming and he’d let them get awfully close before ordering them away. “Do you?” she asked after a moment.

“Do I what?” he snarled, righting his cup with a bang and filling it.

“Want me dead.”

“Quiet, yes. Dead, no.” He raised his cup, glaring at her over the rim and scraping his thumbclaw back and forth across the dented place. “I don’t even particularly want you quiet. This has been nothing if not stimulating conversation. There was a time—” He broke off, then uttered a bitter-sounding laugh and finally drank. “I believe our meal is concluded,” he said. “And as you seem impatient to begin your fruitless audience, let us be about it.”

“There was a time?” Lan prompted, not moving.

He shoved his chair back and stood, thrusting out his open hand for hers. “No more stalling, child. You agreed to this price.”

“There was a time?”

His jaw clenched, causing the scars along his throat to flex and strain. He glared down at her, his open hand aimed like a sword at her heart.

She waited.

In a low, emotionless voice, he said, “There was a time I would have given anything just to have someone talk to me. But that time is over.” He moved around the table to seize her arm in a grip like iron, edged in claws. “Are you ready?”

“No,” said Lan, and raised her chin. “But I’m paid for. So do what you want with me. I don’t care.”

His eyes flickered. The hand digging at her arm loosened…and tightened again. He turned, grimly silent, and pulled her away.

CHAPTER FIVE

After the splendor of Batuuli’s rooms, Azrael’s own, which had seemed so luxuriant when Lan first saw it, now appeared grim and sparse by comparison. The wooden panels lining the walls made the windowless room appear much smaller than it was and it was too dark to make out the beauty of their craftsmanship. Here were no glittering chandeliers, no works of art displayed on polished pedestals, no fine carpets to soften the floor. The bed was as impressive as she remembered, but being the only decoration in the room made it almost seem a separate thing—a stage within an abandoned theater.

Lan stroked the coverlet, listening with half an ear as Azrael ordered his guards in the hall outside to stay at their posts unless he specifically summoned them, no matter what they heard. “Are you anticipating a fight?” she asked when the heavy door was shut.

“Our past encounters illustrate an annoying tendency.” He threw her a pointed scowl as he headed for the bath.

She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re blaming me?”

“You suggest you’re blameless?”

“I’m not the one who trained them to come running every time you raise your voice.”

“I don’t raise my voice in daily course. How else should they respond?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled his loincloth away. “Attuning oneself to the moods of one’s lord is a sign of loyal service. I can hardly condemn them for it. What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

Lan froze in the awkward contortion of trying to find the corset stays behind her back. “Getting undressed?”

“I will have that pleasure.” He removed his collar and one arm brace. “And I will attend to it soon enough.”

“Oh. Okay. Do I…” She looked around the room, seeing nothing to do, nothing to distract the eye. “What do you want me to do?”

“Wait quietly.” Stepping behind the screen, he reached up to unfasten his mask. His silhouette removed it, rubbed his face. He set it aside and stepped down into the bath. “Savor this time. No doubt you think you have no innocence left to lose, but you are wrong.”

Lan’s belly tightened. She took a breath and let it out slowly, forcing herself to relax. “Is that a threat?”

“A warning.” He covered one side of his face and submerged, coming up with a broad splash, shaking himself dry like an animal. “My touch, I’m told, is loathsome and I am in something of a temper tonight.”

Lan stepped away from the bed, watching the screen. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Ha! You think I will not bed a liar?”

“I’m not.”

“Then you are a fool as well as a liar,” he told her. His silhouette reached out for a bottle of something to one side of the bath. He poured it into his hand and rubbed them together, then dabbed at himself in curiously precise points. Tending his scars, she realized. “Instead of seeking to impress me with your courage, you should perhaps consider the very real possibility that there is a reason to fear.”

Lan walked around the screen and looked down into the bath. Azrael looked up at her. The water alone moved.

Horror, like lightning, was the first and brightest strike inside her, but like lightning, its flash quickly faded. It was not a man’s face, no, but it wasn’t so bad. Untold years behind a mask had left his skin with a waxen, uncanny appearance even where it was not damaged…and the damage was so great…and it was maybe that surreal quality that enabled her to look at the face he hid from the rest of the world, from his own Children, without fear.

There were no deformities, no monstrous features, no decay. All the same, it was hard to look and see a living person. His nose was gone, just splinters of exposed bone above an open cavity to mark its place, but with a suggestion of regrowth about the skin building up around it. His brow was broad and sloping, cleaved open to the bone in the center, but mostly healed. Below his left eye, there were cracks that opened wider as they spilled down his cheek, becoming gaps that exposed his teeth and the white gleam of his jawbone before merging with the keloided mess over his throat and sealing again. And over all of it, every inch, was the silvery shine of old scars, a filigree of pain he could hide but never completely heal.

How long she stood staring, Lan could not know. The moment lasted however long it did, breaking only when Azrael finally moved. Lan backed away as he climbed out of his bath, but he simply walked past her and over to the fire to dry himself by its warmth.

“Have you a preference?” he inquired, gesturing toward his rack of masks. “It seems only fitting you should choose the face you shall see over you.”

“No,” said Lan, then said it again with greater confidence. “No. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t wear any of them.”

He grunted and looked away, watching embers flicker and char. “There’s flattery I’ve not heard before.”

“It’s not flattery. What I’ve imagined is so much worse.”

He glanced at her and then, without warning, suddenly leapt at her, crossing the considerable space between them in a single predatory lunge. He seized her in his claws, doubtless sparing her a tumble back into the bath she had entirely forgotten, and yanked her off the ground as he thrust his face right into hers. Her eyes throbbed with the baking heat of his; bloodless hollows, runneled flesh and dry bone filled her vision. “What is there worse than this?” he snarled, his sharp teeth almost touching her lips.

Lan braced herself, then reached up and queasily touched his cheek, her fingertips rasping over cracked flesh until it split and became cool bone. She could feel dry muscle and threads of tendons jump beneath her palm…as if he’d flinched. Then he pulled away.

For a moment, she was certain he’d hit her. Then he smiled. The ruin of the left side twisted it into a leer, but somehow it was the perfect right side that made the smile terrible. “This much I’ll say for you, diplomat. When you commit yourself to a course, you commit yourself wholly.”

“What do you want from me, Azrael?” she asked, keeping her voice low and steady while trying to slow her racing heart. “You know how much I need you, so whatever it is, I’ll try.”

His expression changed; she couldn’t quite tell how.

“I can be quiet. I can be loud. I can kiss you. I can probably cry. I’m your dolly. I’ll fake it any way you want me to.” Lan took a small step forward and touched him again, following the arch of his broken brow up over the curve of his skull and down along his scarred neck until she reached his chest. She watched her fingertips explore in and out of the bullet-holes she found there—most had healed over, which only made the bone she did find that much more jarring—and then she looked up into his eyes. “But I need you. I can’t afford to be scared of you and I won’t be.”

“As simple as that.”

“Yes.”

“Turn around.”

Lan hesitated, but he only gazed impassively down at her, giving no further instruction and no clue as to what to expect. She stepped back, letting her arms drop to her side. Still he did nothing, so she finally turned her back to him. All her body felt numb, except the space between her shoulderblades, which itched to the point of physical pain.

She had time to take one breath, just one, and then he had her by the corset, lifting her right up to her tiptoes. Something slashed down her back—his hand, his claws—and she let out a whooshing little shout of pain before she realized it hadn’t hurt. The squeeze of the corset had loosened and that was all.

Lan waited, her breath heaving in and out of her unfelt, staring straight ahead at the bed beyond the bathing screen. A sound, something between a growl and a purr, tickled her ear, but when she turned instinctively toward it, his hand closed over her face and turned her away. She found herself staring into the silent audience of his masks—the horned gold, the snarling wolf, the faceless stone, the fanged demon—as he cut her remaining corset stays one by one. When it finally fell away, he yanked her hard against him, his bare chest like ice against her bare back. His hand slipped beneath the fabric of her open dress, sweeping around to her belly and then up, caressing one breast briefly before moving between them. His fingers splayed.

“Your heart is more honest than your mouth,” he murmured. “It’s beating like a rabbit’s. Will you tell me again you have no fear of me?”

“You had to work at it pretty hard.” Her voice broke on the last word as his hand moved again, sliding beneath her sleeve to loosen it. It fell down around her wrist, baring her shoulder, exposing her breast. “Why don’t you want me to look at you?”

“In due time. We barter in pieces, remember?” He loosened the other sleeve. When it fell, he cupped her breasts in both hands, his gentle kneading interrupted now and then by the pricking of his claws at her nipples. “You’ll only close your eyes once you have to see me. Only now that I have said so, you won’t,” he added, letting her hear the twist of his smile at her back. “You’ll stare me down to prove how fearless you are, believing that will give you some advantage in the talks to follow. But your body betrays you. It tells me your true thoughts.”

Lan arched her back, pushing her small breasts firmly into his hands. “What is it telling you now?”

“Mm. It tells me…” He bent, placing his mouth against her ear. The bony ridge above the noseless hole in the center of his face pressed at her cheek. He whispered, “It tells me, ‘End the Eaters.’” He moved to her other ear. “And I won’t. You are about to pay a terrible price for nothing.”

“We’ll see.”

“So you will.” He plucked the combs from her hair and tossed them to the ground—tik, tik, tak. She felt him nuzzling at the nape of her neck, heard him take a deep breath. “Roses. My daughter’s scent. How deeply disturbing. Was it deliberate?”

“I don’t think so. Her servants did everything. Well, not everything,” she amended, glancing down. “Batuuli picked the dress.”

“All the better reason to be rid of it.” He hooked her skirts where they bunched around her hip in clingy folds and pushed them over the swell of her buttocks. Gravity took slow hold; the skirts dropped with a sigh, billowing as they settled, forming petals like a flower around her ankles. He shifted behind her, the hot weight of his erection pressing more firmly against her. “You’re trembling.”

Lan clenched her fists in a futile effort to stop. “I’m cold.”

He stroked her arm—his skin on hers made a sound like sandpaper—then her thigh, and then moved his hand between her legs and slipped one thick finger inside her. “You feel warm enough to me.”

Lan said nothing, all her concentration fixed on relaxing around that invasive hand.

“Would you like to go closer to the fire?” His finger withdrew, only to penetrate again, deeper this time. His other arm closed around her, belying the offer even as he made it and pulling her up, up, until her toes scarcely touched the ground and all her weight was balanced on that slowly working hand. “Or to the bed?”

“What…” Her voice came out too tight and shrill. She swallowed hard, took a shuddering breath, and said, “Whatever you want.”

“Ah. Well. My wants—” He removed his hand and lifted her even higher, fitting himself between her thighs. He thrust, not piercing her or even trying to, but forcing her instead to ride his cock as he mimed the act of sex. “—are not so particular,” he finished.

Lan kicked into empty air, grabbing at his arms, his shoulders, his neck—anywhere to find some support—but she was terrified of snagging her fingers inside one of his many open wounds. At last, she had to give over and let him hold her. Curled tensely around the restraining bar of his arm, her whole body shaking with the force of his mock-thrusts, Lan struggled not to struggle while his cock worked deeper between her folds.

“Oh yes, you’re warm enough,” he grunted, and she was. The friction of his scars rubbing at her in this unexpected way had sparked an intense, almost frightening, rush of heat. “But it does not feel good, does it?” And that was true, too; there was no pretending the thing that held her was a man, a fact that heightened each sensation and stained every response.

‘I’m not afraid,’ Lan thought furiously and bucked back at him, finding his rhythm and coming into clumsy sync.

“I admire the strength of your convictions,” he said dryly. “Let’s see how long they last.”

He lifted her higher, then brought her down around him, snarling in her ear as he slowly impaled her, but her body took him in with blind eagerness. She could feel her juices coating him as he began to move her; if it weren’t for the fountain’s covering babble, she’d be able to hear it as well. None of the desperate fumbles or cool transactions she’d called sex in the past had prepared her to be lifted like this, held, filled. He gave her no pleasure, not the way other men had sometimes tried to give it. The act seemed almost mastabatory in that sense—her body like a fist he used on himself—but there was a terrible need in the way he used her, and something in her recognized it and responded. What should have been a purely physical exchange, something to be bartered and endured, became instead alarmingly intimate and intimacy was something Lan had never known.

In that rush of unexpected and unwelcome emotion, Lan burst into tears.

He stopped at once, which only made her sobs more obvious. Mortified, she clapped both hands over her face, as if hiding them could make them disappear, but the damage was done. He lifted her off him and set her none-too-carefully on her feet.

“Go,” he said.

“No! I’m okay!”

“Clearly.” He paced over to the fireplace and leaned on the mantel, staring into the flames while she fought to get herself under control.

Several minutes passed. The tears would stop, then puke themselves out some more, but at last they dried out, leaving her breathless and a little sick to her stomach. When it was over, finally over, Lan slunk to the bath and splashed a little water on her face. “I don’t know why I did that,” she mumbled.

“I wonder.” He drummed his fingers once, still not looking at her. “Can you finish?”

“Of course I can. I’m fine.”

He grunted, drummed his fingers again, then took a bracing breath and turned around. He smiled, gesturing toward the bed. “When you’re ready, then.”

She went, taking long, forceful strides at first, only to falter and stop when she reached her destination.

He waited a moment or two, then heaved a short sigh. “I’ll mask,” he said, moving toward them.

“It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know, damn it!” She sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to squirm at the feel of the coverlet on her bare bottom. She had to remind herself she’d bathed, that it was okay to touch it. Tears threatened again for no reason and angrily, she opened her arms.

He looked at her.

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“You’re determined. There is a difference.” But he came forward, covering her breast with his scarred hand and pressing her down to the mattress. “But I appreciate the effort and it will be rewarded.” He bent, licking at her nipple. His tongue was black and rough as a cat’s. “I still taste roses.”

“Sorry. They put the lotion kind of everywhere.”

“Did they? Let us test that.” Azrael lowered himself to one knee, licking an unhurried trail along her tense body, now at her belly…now her thigh…and now…

She made a sound. He raised his head, but before he could ask, she said, “I’m fine! No one’s ever…I don’t…It’s different.”

“I like to hear you stammer.” His claws pried her brazenly open; his tongue rasped along her innermost folds, all the way to her clit and back again. “Roses,” he concluded. “They were thorough.”

“S-Sorry.”

“It’s not disagreeable.” His tongue flicked at her clit, teasing it in circular flutters for ages of painless agony before closing his dry lips around it and sucking. At last, he raised his head, then cocked it to one side and said curiously, “Did you know you were wet?”

Lan could only nod, breathing hard.

“That doesn’t happen often. How flattering.” He tasted.

Lan shoved herself back against the mattress, her fists twisting at the coverlet, panting through her bared teeth to keep from making too much noise.

He must have interpreted her struggles as those born of disgust, but while his touch was and could only ever be inhuman, it was not repulsive. What it did was rob her of all power of speech, filling her head with a kind of dark light even as her body locked up tighter and tighter. “Very well,” she heard him say when the assault came to an abrupt end. “I won’t prolong it.”

He rose over her and while she knew what it meant to see his face above her and thought she was ready, still she cried out when he entered her again.

He stopped, only for a moment this time. “You are just going to have to suffer this,” he told her. “But I will be quick.”

Before she could tell him again how fine she was, he began and anything she could have said was crushed in her throat along with a scream of something too feral to be pleasure. Lan thrashed, clawing first at the bedding and then at him, although it wasn’t clear whether she was trying to push him away or pull him closer right up until her hand found the bony blade of his cheek and she surged instinctively up and pressed her mouth to his.

He recoiled, one sharp fang catching on her lip so that she fell back in a daze on the bed with the taste of blood on her tongue.

They stared at each other, both breathing hard.

He was the first to recover, the fires of his eyes blazing as they narrowed. He did not speak, but pulled free of her with a bestial snarl, flipped her roughly onto her stomach and drove back into her with one huge hand between her shoulderblades, pinning her down. He resumed, the whole bed shaking with the force of his thrusts, and Lan bit down on her screams again. With every slap of his hips, she could feel something happening inside her, like a snake coiling before it strikes. The part of her still capable of thought realized this was the loathsome thing he’d warned her about, but it didn’t feel loathsome. It ate her, bite by bite, and she let it eat her, let it burrow in deeper and deeper until there was nothing left and she became it.

It was like fainting, except she didn’t go all the way under. It was like waking up, except she didn’t come all the way out either. It was like dying, then; she died, a little…and came back, changed.

Azrael wasn’t moving. His hand on her back had claws. His breath stirred her hair in gusts, but he didn’t speak.

“Please don’t,” Lan whispered. Whatever it was he’d done to her, it was already fading, leaving a hollow place that seemed so much bigger than her entire body. “Please…don’t stop.”

He made a breathy sound. Not a grunt or a laugh. Lan had been punched in the stomach once; she’d made a sound like that. Then he tore free of her with more violence than he’d ever entered. “Get out.”

Lan’s hands tightened on the coverlet. More useless tears stung her eyes—where were they all coming from? She curled on the bed, suddenly naked and human and stupid.

Azrael stalked over to the door and banged it open, then came back to the bed. He tore the coverlet out from under her and threw it at her as she found her feet. “Get out.”

Lan wrapped herself with shaking hands and left. He slammed the door behind her. The pikemen in the hall looked at each other uncertainly. One of them took half a step toward her, then resumed his post. They ignored her.

Lan went back to her room.

* * *

It was not until hours into that awful night that Lan realized she had not insisted on the audience she had, after all, paid for. So in addition to all the other misery she felt, she had the comfort of knowing he’d been right—she had done it for nothing. By that time, she simply couldn’t cry any more, but she went through the motions just the same, braying and hugging her cramping stomach while her swollen, aching eyes stayed dry.

How had she lost control so completely? And to what? Before tonight, she would have been sure there were no sexual mysteries left to discover. She’d been with men she’d wanted more, men who’d made her feel good. Whatever Azrael had made her feel when he’d trapped her in his bed, it wasn’t good. She was nothing to him but a squeeze he hadn’t felt yet, a new toy he could play with and put up any time he wanted. And honestly, that was a role she was comfortable in and certainly the role she expected a dolly to perform, so what the hell had happened?

She couldn’t answer, so she cried. At last, she slept, curled on the floor with her head under the bed and Azrael’s coverlet, not a red one, wrapped around her shoulders.

In the morning, she was awakened by the noisy tromp of boots in the echoing tower stairwell, which gave her enough time to sit up and make sure that everything that ought to be covered was before the door opened. A guard entered and stood aside for two dead women dressed as dining hall servants. The first carried a tray with tea and coffee—real coffee, not just brewed roots—along with real cream, sugar, honey, drinking chocolate, cinnamon sticks and a small caddy filled with spices and flavor extracts. The second brought in three covered dishes, a napkin folded to look like a bird, and a relatively small selection of silverware. The spoon had a ribbon tied around it.

Lan, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, watched as they arranged all this on the vanity and wordlessly left again. The guard closed the door without ever even looking directly at her.

Was she still his dolly? After last night and everything? Or was he just feeding her before he sent her away?

Pointless, asking questions she knew she couldn’t answer. If he was turning her out, she’d learn soon enough. If she was still his dolly, she’d learn that too. She wasn’t terribly eager either way.

But she was hungry, so she ate. She drank the coffee pot dry one half-cup at a time, trying out various combinations until she found out just what she liked. The idea of having a ‘favorite’ coffee still struck her as absurd and possibly sinful, but she supposed Mayor Fairchild’s wife had a favorite fine dress and Elvie Peters had a favorite necklace, so why not favorite coffee?

She worked her way through the breakfast slowly, eating the porridge while it was hot and wrapping the sausages and scones in the napkin for later. There was a little dish of fruit, too—grapes and apples, no peaches—which she hid under the pillow of her bed, just in case the servants came back to clear the trays. And because she was bored and full of coffee, she decided to make their job easier by stacking everything together so one person could carry it all. It was as she was shifting plates around, catching odd crumbs and stray drops of honey and licking them off her fingers, that Lan found the paper.

It was a smallish paper, a hand’s width on all sides, folded over and mostly hidden under that flowerpot. Very white, that was the first thing she noticed. There was paper in Norwood, of course, they weren’t that far-gone country, but it was of the rough, reddish sort they milled in Torrey Green. This was different in every way, so much that she wasn’t even sure she could call it paper. She could neither see nor feel the bits of rag and flax fibers that it was made of, nor could she smell the retting or the ammonia they must have used to get it so perfectly white.

There were letters written on one side, well more than it took to spell her name. The handwriting was neat and level, with a broad stroke and looping flourishes at the ends. Lan traced them over with her fingertip curiously, then unfolded the paper and had a look at the letters inside. She had a thought it might be the menu, but it didn’t look like a list. Instructions to the servants? The ticklish idea that it might be a note to Lan herself did occur, but what a silly place to put it, if so…under a plate, with only the corner sticking out, easily overlooked.

Lan tossed it back on the tray and wandered over to the window, looking out over the roofs of Haven at the unnatural stillness of the city. Looked like rain on the horizon, but it wasn’t here yet. No way to shut the window. Her bed was going to get soaked. With any luck, she wouldn’t be in it tonight.

She was still there, cloud-watching and restless, when she heard footsteps once more on the stair. Lan straightened up, tucking her coverlet more securely around her body, and waited expectantly in the middle of the room for the door to open. Just the guard and one servant this time. She gave Lan an irritated sort of glance as she took everything off the trays and stacked them on again, all but the teapot which was still full and which she must have thought Lan still wanted, but paused when she spied the paper. Careful not to touch it or to look again at Lan, the dead woman took her tray and left.

Once more alone, Lan sat down on the bed, but she had hardly begun to fume when the door opened again and the servant stuck her head in.

“Are you sure you want to be rid of this?” she asked, holding up the paper between two fingers with an odd sort of look on her face.

Lan shrugged and nodded.

The dead woman stared at her.

“Why? What’s it say?”

Now the servant looked back at the guard, who deliberately turned his back on the both of them and pretended the head of his pike needed inspecting. The servant came all the way inside, set down the dishes, and closed the door. Holding the paper between the very tips of her fingers so as to have as little to do with it as possible, she read, “To my blameless Beauty in her tower,” and looked at Lan.

“Okay?” said Lan after a puzzled moment.

The servant unfolded the paper, making a point to appear uncomfortable, but with that same gossiping gleam in her eye that Lan supposed all people, living or dead, must feel with poking their fingers into other people’s pies. “How inconstant I must seem. I have made claim of simple desires, given you rein without direction, only to cast you out for daring to anticipate the one whim I do not possess. You confessed early enough and often enough that you are innocent—” The servant paused to give Lan a dubious look from under the shadow of her hair. “—of the courtesan’s coy trade, and for all your skill at barter, I see it is true and surely the most forgivable of offenses. By my accounting, you have paid a precious coin and I would not see you so misspent. If you are content to remain, I am content to have you.”

“Okay?” Lan said again, even more baffled than before.

“Do you have an answer?” the servant asked, pinching the paper shut again.

“Was that a question?”

In the doorway, the guard shook his head and sighed.

The servant put the paper down on the vanity and gave it a pat. She picked up her tray again. “Like reading to a pig,” she muttered and the guard replied, “Not at all. Pigs are actually quite intelligent.” The door banged shut on their shared laughter, leaving Lan blushing on the bed, unsure of just why she was embarrassed, but embarrassed all the same.

After a few minutes, she jumped up, snatched the paper and half-tore, half-crumpled it into a wad, then threw it out the window. She felt better.

The day passed with nothing to do. Lan stood. She sat. She lay down. The rain finally came and the bed got wet, exactly as expected. There was nothing to be done about it, so Lan merely scooted around as far from the window as she could and lay down again so that only her feet got wet. She put her wet feet on the wall and amused herself stamping footprints as far up it as she could go. She counted lightning flashes (seventeen) and rolls of thunder (twenty-two). She draped herself in Azrael’s coverlet as many different ways as she could imagine (not many). She ate the rest of her breakfast when she got hungry and drank her cold tea just to get rid of it. She got up and walked, trying to step on every single floorboard in turn, mincing back and forth with her arms out like wings. Once in a while, she opened the door and looked down the dark stairs, but never went further than her own landing. There was a lock on the other side of the door; she wasn’t about to give anyone a reason to start using it.

At last, the light behind the storm went out and soon after, Lan heard the expected sound of boots in the stairwell. Again, she stood, hurriedly redraping her coverlet.

It was a not a guard looking down his perfect nose at her this time, but one of the dead servants, albeit one dressed a bit better than the dead women earlier. He did not have a tray with him, but he did have a frothy bit of cloth draped over one arm which he looked at as one looks at something for the last time before tossing it at her. “My lord commands you to join him for dinner.”

“What?”

He did not repeat himself, just left.

Lan shook the thin fabric out and discovered another dress, pretty and flimsy, too tight and too cold. ‘Dollies don’t get to complain,’ she reminded herself, but gave the coverlet a yearning stare as she put it on. It left her arms bare, not to mention too much of her chest, and the skirts were so light, both in color and in weight, that she could see the shadow of her legs right through them. The breeze that blew through the window flattened the cloth to her body, outlining everything that was not already full on display, so that she might as well be naked and just painted blue with a few fluttery kerchiefs tied around her waist.

Never mind. It didn’t matter. She had a job to do and she could do it naked or dressed or anywhere in between. Keep focus, that was the important thing. Eat dinner with Azrael (she was hungry), dolly up with him after (remember not to kiss him), and do it right this time (maybe he’d let her sleep in his nice, dry bed).

The servant was waiting for her on the landing with a light, which he held up so that he could look her over and make sure she saw his disapproval before he headed downstairs. He did not speak to her again or even glance back to see if she was following. The guards posted outside the dining hall uncrossed their pikes at her approach, but Azrael’s steward seemed surprised to see her.

“At my lord’s request,” Lan’s escort said in response to the steward’s obvious uncertainty, and after a tense moment more, the steward nodded and the doors were opened.

Dinner was well underway and the noise of the dead court’s pretended revelry was tremendous, but not for long. As soon as Lan entered the hall, those at the lesser tables saw her and stopped talking, prompting those seated further north to look around and also stop talking. In this way, the quiet rippled outward until the entire hall was watchful and silent. Lan’s escort left her frozen at the center of their stares and continued on up the aisle to take his place with the rest of Lord Solveig’s valets, of which he was clearly one, now that she could see them all together. And it was Solveig who started the applause, but that got picked up too, so that Lan soon stood alone and foolish at one end of a long tunnel of deafening handclapping, staring up at the empty imperial table where Azrael was nowhere in evidence.

“My dear rumpled dove!” Solveig called, coming to collect her. “My delightful little disaster, how good of you to join me! We missed you so at breakfast! Father can be such a bore about keeping his toys to himself.”

She wasn’t supposed to be here. Lan backed up a step, then turned around and tried to leave, only to see the doors shut against her.

“There now, don’t be shy,” Solveig said, taking her arm. “Father won’t mind. No, he likes it when his Children and his warmbloods get on. And how pretty you look in that frock! Well…relatively. Do you like it?”

“Where’s Azrael?”

“To be honest, you look awful,” Solveig said, ignoring the question as he led her up the aisle. “Father can be a brute, can’t he? But I’m sure some of it can be smoothed over. Come now, sit at my table. Fido will give you his seat, there’s a good dog.”

One of his courtiers got up and stood aside, holding his chair and even pushing it in for her as she sat down. Solveig plucked the sparkly combs from another courtier’s hair and used them to bind Lan’s up. In another moment, they were all around her, offering their jewels or adjusting her dress or even rubbing their make-up off with their fingers and smearing it on her.

It was too much. She tried to sit still for it and couldn’t, but saying no brought on laughter and when she squirmed, they just held her down. Their hands were everywhere—on her face, in her hair, down the front of her dress to fluff her breasts like pillows, up her skirts to massage perfume into her thighs—and their smiling, sneering, beautiful faces shrieking gleefully in her ears, until suddenly, they weren’t.

“That’s better,” said Solveig, taking his chair as Lan sprang out of hers. “But whatever is the matter, dear? You ought to be used to a little rough handling by now. And if you’re not, well, you’d better learn.”

“Where’s Azrael?”

“Sit down. Eat something.” Solveig waved a servant over to clear away the dishes in front of the now-empty chair and bring a clean setting. “Father will want to see you fed when it pleases him to drop by.”

“Where is he?” Lan asked loudly.

“Stop teasing her, brother,” Batuuli said and leaned out over the table so she could point past Lan to another empty table, the one where Lady Tehya should be sitting. “My sister had a small accident at breakfast.”

“Yes,” Solveig drawled. “She accidentally peeled her face off with a paring knife and threw it on Father’s plate. He’ll be all night persuading her to let him mend it, so if you had an appointment with him later, you ought to consider it postponed.”

“Peeled her face off?” Lan echoed dumbly, looking from one to the other of them, searching in vain for some sign that they were having her on.

“He made a comment about her mask and, well, she’s a bit high-spirited,” Solveig explained and gestured again at the many, many platters before her. “If you don’t see anything you like, by all means, place an order with the kitchen. The peaches are especially sweet, I hear.”

Lan looked at him sharply.

He smiled.

“Sit with me, then,” Batuuli ordered. “If my brother is determined not to behave, he shan’t have the pleasure of your company.”

“I think I should go.”

Batuuli flapped a hand at her and picked through a bowl of fruit for just the right grape to taste. “Then go. I’ll just tell Father you refused our hospitality, shall I?”

Lan looked once more at the doors at the end of the hall, then at Azrael’s empty throne, and finally sighed and went over to sit with Batuuli. She took a piece of bread and grimly ate it, aware of smirks and whispers all around her, trying not to startle every time someone laughed too shrilly or too close.

“While we wait,” Batuuli said brightly, “I’ve arranged some entertainment in our guest’s honor.”

Apprehension was an immediate cold knot in Lan’s belly. “Me?”

Batuuli smiled at her and clapped her hands twice.

Azrael’s steward went out into the hall and came back shortly with a whole company of dead men and women dressed for the stage. Some were in costumes—women made to look like deer or rabbits, men like stags or foxes—while others wore form-fitting onesies and masks and carried bits of scenery painted up with trees. Seeing them, Lan felt a twinge of interest in spite of herself. Performers came to Norwood once in a while, staging plays and magic acts and singing foreign songs, but it cost a half’slip to see them and Lan’s mother rarely had it to ‘throw away on nonsense.’ And there was no comparison as far as quality, she was sure. The deer and stags leaped about in synchronized steps while the rabbits and foxes tumbled, and as much dread as Lan still felt, she was transfixed and soon forgot even the company she was in to join with their laughter and applause.

Then, by some predetermined signal, the ‘animals’ all froze, looked up, and gracefully scattered. The dining hall doors opened wide and in stumbled a woman. A living woman.

She looked as Lan herself must have looked—dressed in torn layers of ill-fitting clothes, her hair in straggled knots, muddy boots and dirty face. She stared around, seeing the hall as Lan must have seen it—oversized, overbright, overfed. She saw Azrael’s court, a hundred dead, smirking faces, and the empty throne. She saw the lights and the flowers and the food. She saw Lan.

The masked performers were stealthily circling as the woman stood staring at Lan staring at her. She only noticed them when they began to press forward, herding her with painted trees into the middle of the hall.

“What is this?” Lan asked. Her voice seemed very small, easily swallowed by the dead laughter that followed. “What are you doing?”

“Just watch.” Batuuli patted her hand, but her eyes never left the stumbling figure of the woman, reeling from one side of the wide center space to the other. “It’s all in fun.”

The dining hall doors opened again, this time to admit five dead men, dressed in artistically tattered shirts and trousers, all clean but in muddy colors—Haven’s idea of village attire. Their faces were painted pale, with their eyes and mouths outlined in black, so that their leers could be seen even by those sitting furthest away.

“Lovely,” someone said. Someone else called for more wine.

The woman backed away as the five men came forward, then turned and tried to run, but the scenery closed her in. She pushed at them, scratching and slapping from panel to panel, and all the while, the men came closer.

“Stop it!” Lan shouted. She jumped up, only to be caught and forced back into her chair. Batuuli leaned over to twine their arms together, like sisters or like lovers.

“Isn’t this exciting?” she murmured. “Isn’t this just how you imagined it?”

The men were almost on her now, so the woman turned to fight, producing a hunting knife in an instant from the sheath strapped under her shirt. She slashed, silent, keeping her movements small and conserving her strength. She’d fought like this before and won. But these men were already dead.

The room cheered as they took her down, their many hands pressing her limbs to the polished tiles and splaying her open. One of them took the knife and began to saw through her many layers of shirts. Another straddled her thigh backwards and began to wrestle with her boot.

He was stealing her boots.

All at once, Lan knew what she was watching, what Batuuli had meant all along for her to see.

Lan screamed, tried to throw herself at them, but she was held just as much as the woman on the ground. She was held and had to watch as the woman’s trousers were pried down and devices produced and fit around dead members to make fitting weapons. One boot was off. The other was being unlaced and Lan never heard anything but the laughter and applause and her own self screaming until Azrael’s roar:

“What the hell goes on in here?”

Silence from the court. There was no apology offered, only a wary confusion from the performers and their audience. Azrael strode forward, shoving painted trees and costumed men aside until he could see the woman at their center, gulping air and struggling to pull her trousers up as she lay on her back.

He did not need a long look to know what he was seeing. He swung on Batuuli, his eyes blazing, then turned his back to her and aimed his arm like a reaping scythe at the servants and guards lining the walls. “Who was it?” he demanded. “Who carried tales out of this hall?”

Below him, shivering, the woman gathered her feet beneath her, skittish as a young hare who hears the hounds, but she did not run. Her eyes darted to her hunting knife, still in the hand of one of the performers, then to the nearest table.

“I say you will stand forward!” Azrael bellowed.

Exchanging nervous glances, two of the servants stepped forward, followed a beat later by a third.

“My lord, the lady Batuuli—” one of them began.

“Impale them! And you!” He reached out and seized the nearest actor, pulling him entirely off the ground and giving him a shake that would have snapped a living man’s neck. “Where came you by this woman?”

“I don’t know, my lord,” the man stammered. “She was provided with the script.”

“Mine is the law here! Not my daughter’s! Traffic of the living is forbidden in Haven! Who among you does not know this?” Azrael threw the man into a table and turned on Batuuli, but before he could speak, the woman lunged out, yanked the carving fork from a capon and leapt. Lan let out a shout of alarm that held perhaps half Azrael’s name. He turned toward her and the fork that might have otherwise been buried in his back instead stabbed hilt-deep into his left eye.

Lan screamed—a hoarse, unlovely, dog-like baying. Azrael staggered, slapping his assassin to the ground as the sound still hung in the air and then there were pikemen on every side, breaking around him like black waves. Lan had not heard their running boots, but she heard the sound it made when a body is pierced—it is a quiet sound—and she heard it over and over and over. Batuuli applauded and Solveig joined in, as if the execution of their father’s attacker were just another act in the play, but not even their fawning courtiers dared to follow along.

Lan twisted free of the hands that held her and ran forward, only to be seized and thrown down beside the other woman with a boot in her back and a pike digging into the side of her neck. From that vantage, with Azrael a thousand feet tall above her, she saw his hand close around the fork imbedded in his head. He pulled it out, inch by slow inch, as if it had been sunk in tar, and like tar, it came burning, dripping white fire in clots that turned grey in the open air and burned away before they hit the ground. Fresh flame sparked in his smoldering socket. He looked at the fork, the tines now bent and charred black, and threw it away.

He lunged, batting pikemen aside like curtains to seize the woman on the floor and lift her by her throat high over his head. There was blood all down her chest, blood still pouring out of her, streaming down his arm, spattering his face—more blood than anyone could lose and live, and Lan could see her dying, see the terrified, trembling smile as she looked down past the clawed hand that held her and spat onto his golden mask.

Azrael did not flinch. He let her defiance trickle down his false face and merely said, “I would have let you live, human. And now…I will not let you die.”

There was a sound, but Lan didn’t hear it with her ears. It struck just once, charging the air like lightning, and then Azrael let her drop.

She struck the floor and lay weakly kicking and writhing for as long as it took her to die—not long—and then was still.

And then, slowly, she sat up. One of her hands rose and made weak scratching motions over her chest. Her mouth gaped. She shook her head twice side to side, like an unbroken ox trying to throw its yoke, then heaved up a tremendous amount of blood and fell back again. She lay choking, her lungs too full of blood for air, and Lan had to see that awful confusion fill her eyes as she began to realize she didn’t need air after all. She wasn’t dying; she was dead.

“No!” Lan cried.

“No?” Azrael swung around and advanced on her as the pikeman hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “You tell me no? Am I the villain here? I, the murderer? How can that be?” he demanded, his voice rising to a deafening roar. “She will never die! Get her out of here!”

The pikeman at her back caught Lan’s arm and dragged her away at what was nearly a run.

“And you,” Azrael said.

Batuuli’s voice, calm and smiling: “I?”

“Have you nothing to say?”

“Now that you mention it, you’ve ruined my play.”

“Have I? That can be amended.”

Lan looked back, just in time to see Azrael seize Batuuli by her braids and pull her across the table, smearing her fine white gown with pork grease and wine as she gasped and even struggled in a small, startled way.

“You seem to be missing a player,” Azrael snarled and threw his daughter at the lead actor. “Proceed.”

And then, thankfully, Lan was out and the dining hall doors slammed shut on the first of Batuuli’s outraged screams.

CHAPTER SIX

Every night that Lan had so far spent in Haven was the worst, but the night that followed Batuuli’s play was as far above the previous worst as the stars were above the Earth. In the Red Room, removed from the sights and sounds, she tortured herself with an endless cycle of memories and imagination, until they began to blur together.

‘Am I the villain here?’ he had asked and sometimes, she wished she’d answered him, screamed ‘Yes!’ and slapped and even spit, the way the other woman had, the way her mother surely would have done, while Lan only lay there on the floor and watched. And sometimes she thought of other answers, calm words and reasoned arguments she could sand down and polish and reshape here in her tower until she was certain they would have convinced him, and that other woman would be dead now and at peace, and what the hell, maybe he would even be sorry.

Am I the villain? He’d killed her, but wouldn’t let her die. Am I the villain? But she’d stabbed him. Am I the villain? But she’d been captured and held down to be publicly violated and murdered in that roomful of laughing, costumed dead people. Am I the villain? It was Batuuli’s fault, but Batuuli had been captured too, in a way, pulled out of her own life and forced to perform in his play, the one in which she was his daughter.

The wheel kept turning, no beginning and no end. There were no villains or they all were, and in either case, nobody got what they deserved.

Adrenaline doesn’t last and, without it, horror is exhausting. Lan stubbornly waited, sometimes leaning up against her heavy door, straining to hear screams, and sometimes standing at her narrow window, imagining she smelled smoke, but mostly just sitting on the bed and doing nothing, thinking nothing. Eventually, she crawled beneath it and gave in to sleep.

Neither boots on the stair nor the heavy door opening woke her in the morning. Instead, it was a cold hand gripping her bare ankle, which was so unexpected that Lan bolted upright, or would have done if she hadn’t been partly underneath the bed. After delivering herself a solid crack to the skull, Lan wriggled out into the red light of a very early day and peered up into Lady Batuuli’s smiling face.

She had one clear thought—She woke me up so I’d see death coming—but she did absolutely nothing about it. There was nothing to be done, she would tell herself later, and later still she would tell herself there wouldn’t have been time anyway, but the reality was, she just lay there and she would always know it.

“Join me for breakfast,” Batuuli said, then turned around and swept out again.

Lan sat on the floor long enough to convince herself that had indeed happened. When it sank all the way in, she got up and made her way down the stairs in the dark.

Batuuli was waiting for her in the grand corridor, although she did not acknowledge her when Lan finally appeared. Without so much as a glance in her direction, Batuuli left off her disinterested inspection of a painting and walked away. The guards posted along the walls nodded as she passed by. Servants, mostly dead but some living, had to stop as well, bowing themselves almost in half as they scurried about their morning duties. No one paid any attention at all to Lan.

“What is this about?” Lan asked.

“Patience.”

“Fuck patience. Answer me.”

Batuuli threw her a laughing glance. “The last stupid girl who raised her voice to me had her mouth sewn shut around an iron ring,” she said pleasantly. “The ring was attached to a wire and the wire to a weight. The weight was thrown from the roof. The ring made such a cheerful sound when it struck the pavement. Her teeth made a sound like rain.”

They walked, and when Lan had been quiet enough long enough, Batuuli said, “I have plans. You will not impede them. Only be a good girl and do as you’re told and your part will end quickly.”

“My part? Another play?”

“How forceful you are. And no, I never repeat my tricks, particularly those that end so badly. Listen,” Batuuli said, now with the faintest hint of annoyance. “This morning is nothing to do with you. You’re a prop, like the dagger in Lady MacBeth’s hand—vital to your scene, but silent. Understand?”

“Who’s Lady MacBeth?”

“Just be quiet.”

Batuuli’s retinue was not in evidence today when they reached her chambers, but the table that had been arranged in her receiving room was set for three, with food enough for ten. Whatever space this left on the table was occupied by sprays of flowers wrapped in ribbons and strings of pearls, and to either side, like bookends on a shelf, were the two flayed pikemen who had escorted Lan to Azrael’s dining hall that first night.

“I agree,” Batuuli commented, coming to stand at Lan’s side as she stared in horrified fascination at one of their flayed, burnt, blinking faces. “It isn’t very nice. But it was a gift and gifts should always be visible when the giver comes calling.”

As if summoned by these words, Azrael opened the door. He took two steps and stopped when he saw Lan.

“Father, you’re early.” Batuuli gestured toward the wall where her handmaidens stood in a silent row. “Feel free to entertain yourself while I dress my guest. Celestine, come and lick my father’s cock.”

One of the handmaidens stepped forward. Azrael stopped her with a raised hand. Behind his mask, his fiery eyes were cold. “I should have known this was some game of yours when I received the invitation.”

“Yes, you really should have. But now you might as well stay and play, since all the pieces are in place.” Batuuli took Lan’s arm and led her from the room, making certain to steer her so close to Azrael in passing that they could not help but touch.

He did not look at her.

In Batuuli’s bedchamber, the rest of the handmaidens were waiting and at their Lady’s signal, they descended on Lan as a unified force. The previous night’s gown, considerably the worse for having been slept in, was stripped away. Lan’s naked body was scrubbed with a cold sponge, dried with a rough cloth and then lotioned. In less than a minute, the process was complete and she was hurried to a wardrobe to make a selection of the gowns displayed there.

“Nothing too rich,” Batuuli mused, pulling out dresses and tossing them to the ground. “We want morning colors…rose…lavender…yellow?” She put a gauzy slip up to Lan’s neck, only to wince elaborately. “Definitely not yellow.”

“What am I doing here? Really?”

“Really, did you say? And when have I ever lied to you?” Batuuli played at pouting, but then turned to face her fully. “I want to hurt him. You’re going to help me.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. You already are. You looked at him with the same eyes that saw his true face…and then his true self.” Batuuli smiled. “You could not have stabbed him deeper than if you’d used a carving fork.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“You’re delightful when you bristle, but we haven’t the time, dear. Just think. It’s entirely to your benefit that Father is reminded what a brute he is, isn’t it? How else can you possibly hope to convince him that life—” She steepled her hands beneath her chin and raised her eyes to heaven. “—is precious?” And she laughed.

“What do you want me to do?” Lan asked tightly.

“Why, nothing! Just sit and eat and look at him.” Batuuli spread her arms, demonstrating the great nothing she asked of her.

Lan reached into the wardrobe.

“Oh no!” Batuuli said, laughing harder. “You haven’t the complexion to wear white! Nor the virtue, I should think.”

Lan pulled it over her head.

Batuuli sighed and put the other dresses back. “Oh just stop, you’re making a muddle of it. Serafina! Ariel!”

The handmaidens chased Lan’s hands away from the gown and straightened it out in seconds. Worse than the feeling of being dressed was knowing she’d needed help; what she’d thought was the neck-hole turned out to be a sleeve and what had seemed to be a belt was actually the top. She was not dressed as much as draped, which should have made her look like one of the statues in the great hall but didn’t. She looked like what she was—a farmer wrapped in white cloth.

The handmaidens descended on her again and in another minute, her hair was brushed and artfully piled atop her head, her face was painted and there were sandals tied to her feet.

“The difference really is dramatic,” Batuuli remarked, inspecting the end result. “Even if it isn’t quite successful.”

Lan plucked self-consciously at a fold of her gown. The handmaiden Serafina slapped her hand and readjusted the draping.

“Well, let’s not keep Father waiting.” Batuuli took her arm and led her back to her receiving room. Azrael had seated himself at the center of the table, forcing Lan to sit next to one of the mutilated pikemen. So close, the smell was inescapable—not rot and only faintly of char, but just the stink of open wounds. Her stomach clenched as her plate was filled with pasties and fruit; she picked one up, but put it down again when the pikeman beside her groaned.

“Hush,” said Azrael, holding out his plate so a servant could drizzle a sliced pear with honey.

The pikeman quieted.

Coffee was presented, along with cream, sugar, cinnamon and chocolate, but although Lan mixed herself her favorite concoction, she only sat there stirring it. Azrael’s appetite seemed undiminished by his surroundings or the tension in the air, which was such that every scrape of Azrael’s fork seemed to fall directly on Lan’s ear.

Batuuli sat watching them and sipping tea. At length, she sighed. “Father, you’re being terribly rude.”

Azrael cut into a hot pastry and did not respond.

“I understand why you might not wish to run through the usual boring pleasantries with me, but what of our guest? Surely she deserves at least a token acknowledgement.”

Lan glanced at him. He continued to give his breakfast his full attention, eating mechanically and without enjoyment.

“She chose the dress herself,” Batuuli said, smiling into her cup.

Azrael’s eyes shifted in the sockets of his mask, staining the white fabric of Lan’s dress briefly whiter, making it almost seem to glow. Still he said nothing.

“You know, I never had the chance to ask, between one thing and another yesterday.” Batuuli waved at the air, fanning away all the unpleasantness of the previous day’s events like a fart. “But how did you enjoy your new pet? I confess I didn’t think it much of an honor when you sent her to me to be prepared, but I did take some pride in my work. The least you could do is tell me how I did. Was she pleasing? Were her cheeks like pale roses just blushed with dawn’s color? Her lips like sweet berries? Her eyes like…What color are your eyes?” she asked, leaning over the table to peer at Lan’s face. “Her eyes like puddles of rainwater on a filthy road. Did her face please you, Father? Did her scrawny body twine about you in new and exciting ways? Did she charm you? Win you? Fascinate your senses and stimulate your passions? Did she get your cock hard?”

“Mind your tongue.”

“Father never divulges bedroom secrets,” Batuuli told Lan. “Which is amusing, because he’s been happy enough to plow his cum-pockets in front of us in the past.”

Azrael’s cup slammed down, making Lan jump and Batuuli raise an eyebrow in polite inquiry.

“Did I say cum-pockets?” she asked with elaborate surprise. “How embarrassing. I meant courtesans. Do forgive me, although I daresay our guest has been called worse in her time.” She turned to Lan. “Haven’t you?”

“I have, as a matter of fact.”

“You see? All friends here. So.” She poured herself a fresh cup of tea and tossed the pot to the floor. It burst in a billow of shards and steam. Her handmaidens came running while Batuuli added a spoonful of sugar and stirred, smiling over at Lan. “How was he?”

Lan rolled her eyes and poked at the filling of her pastry. It was some kind of red jam. She didn’t feel like tasting it to find out what kind.

“I’m told you were out of his chambers less than an hour after entering. Much less. One wonders if perhaps the anticipation got the best of him. It’s happened before.”

Azrael tipped his head, regarding his daughter with the cold curiosity of a man watching the behavior of a bug. “You were told, were you? By whom?”

“Well, that’s the thing about the dead,” said Batuuli, buttering a scone. “Unless their glorious lord gives them a specific order to the contrary, they tend to be rather stupid about indelicate matters. And I am one of your Children, after all. Why shouldn’t they answer? So when I asked how long you rode your pretty pony—”

“That is enough.”

Batuuli looked up, her brows arched in feigned surprise. “Shall I not call her that either? My, you are feeling particular this morning. What would you prefer? Your pleasure dove? Your sister of mercy? Or, what was the word you used?” she asked Lan.

“Dolly,” said Lan.

Azrael’s eyes sparked in the sockets of his mask.

“No, not that. The other one.” Batuuli tapped at the corner of her mouth, pretending to think, then snapped her fingers and said, “Your dirty whore!”

Lan’s face warmed. She put her fork down and folded her hands tightly in her lap.

“Now she’s shy,” said Batuuli with a careless shrug. “But she was bold enough when you sent her to me. She stood right where you’re sitting now and shouted it. It might have been an act, I suppose. Or perhaps she’s acting for us now. How easy it is to hide one’s true heart in a world where even God goes masked.” She turned her smile on Azrael again. “But you unmasked for her, or so I was told. And she fled in tears.”

“I did not!” Lan snapped.

“You needn’t be embarrassed. Many of his concubines have hysterics the first time.”

“I didn’t have hysterics and I wasn’t crying!”

“But you did flee.”

“He threw me out!”

The instant she said it, she regretted it, but there was no calling it back.

Batuuli’s smile spread like honey, golden and slow. “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Lan looked to Azrael for any kind of clue as to how to cut her way free of this mess, but he only continued to watch his daughter’s performance with detached indifference.

“Was he impotent?” Batuuli purred. “Tell me, could he not be a man in his own bed?”

Lan knew any answer was the wrong one, but silence seemed so damning. “He was plenty potent,” she mumbled.

“Hardly an enthusiastic testimonial.”

“He was fine.”

“One wonders what constitutes ‘fine’ in the wilds of Norwood.” Batuuli picked up her tea, considering her. “But if so, then you must have done something. Oh, he’s had plenty of playthings run from him, but Father has never, ever hurled one out into the hall. I’m not sure whether you ought to be ashamed of that or proud, but it’s worth mentioning. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Lan, and felt her stomach clench, as if in echo of that cold/hot moment when he’d been inside her and she’d been…somewhere and someone else.

“I’m told the gown was beyond repair,” Batuuli was saying. “At the time, I assumed it was due to Father’s usual exuberance, but did he actually attack you? Did you scream when you saw his true face bearing down on you?”

“No.”

Batuuli laughed at first, the sort of mocking laughter that meant she thought she’d caught Lan in an inventive lie, but then looked at her father, then at Lan again. “You know, I think I believe you,” she said, sounding mildly surprised, not by Lan’s statement as much as by her own acceptance of it. “In fact, one could almost imagine you wanted to see his face, that it was you who insisted he unmask.” She looked at Azrael. “Did she?”

He did not answer, not with a word or with any change of expression.

“She did,” Batuuli breathed and turned her round, wondering eyes on Lan. “You deviant!”

“You are hardly one to throw that particular stone,” Azrael said.

“Well, aren’t you the sullen beast this morning?” Batuuli buttered a point of toast and bit it off. “Do you expect me to apologize for arranging my little entertainment last night? I rather enjoyed the way the performance ended, unexpected as it was. I was magnificent, in fact. You should have stayed to watch.”

“I might have done, had there been anything worthwhile to see, but as always, I found your taste questionable, your theme unoriginal and your execution crude.” Azrael ate a bite of sausage and washed it down with wine. “You may award yourself all the accolades you please, daughter, but from what I saw, your ‘entertainment’ was, like yourself, disappointing.”

“How very hurtful,” Batuuli said after a moment. She turned. “Lan—”

“This is nothing to do with her,” Azrael said sharply. “Leave her be.”

Batuuli gave that a beat, then put out her hand and said in an exaggerated way, “Lan, dear, please pass the sugar.”

Azrael’s eyes narrowed.

Lan found the bowl next to her untouched coffee and passed it under his withering stare.

Batuuli spooned some into her tea and stirred. “Honestly.”

He uttered an unconvinced grunt in the back of his throat and picked up his cup.

“But you’re oddly protective for someone who threw his whore—”

Bang, went the cup. “You will not call her that!”

“I am sorry, we never settled on a word. His dolly,” she amended with an apologetic nod in Lan’s direction. “Threw his dolly naked into the hall mere minutes after bringing her into his chamber. If she didn’t please you, Father, why did you not have her thrown over the wall to her hungry Eaters?”

Lan looked at him. He ignored her.

“If she did,” Batuuli went on, stirring her tea, “why did you leave her in her tower? Why set the guard that kept my brother at bay? Why feed her from the royal kitchens? Why—”

“I feel no pressing urge to defend myself to you.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, it isn’t an attack! It’s just odd. Even she thinks so.” Batuuli turned to Lan. “Don’t you think so?”

“This is nothing to do with her.”

“Nonsense, it’s everything to do with her! Don’t you find her attractive?”

Azrael did not reply.

“Well, never mind,” said Batuuli, giving Lan’s hand a comforting pat. “Looks aren’t everything. Although I am quite astonished you didn’t at least visit her last night. Poor thing. The play quite affected her.”

“It was intended to,” Azrael said in a hard voice.

“I was fine.”

Batuuli smirked at her. “Yes, we all saw how ‘fine’ you were. Anyone would think it really had been your mother. And you, you unfeeling brute, you sent her to her room alone.”

Azrael put his silverware down too hard and pushed his plate away. “What is the point of this game?”

“Conversation! Really, now! Other daughters have breakfast with their father’s whores without all this hostility!”

“Call her so again at your peril, daughter. I will not have her insulted for your pleasure.”

“Are you insulted?” Batuuli asked, turning to Lan.

“I don’t care what you call me.”

“You see? She doesn’t care.”

“I do.”

“Well then, let’s be clear. I’m insulting you for my pleasure. It is the only pleasure I take in your company, dear, dear Father.” Batuuli paused, her smile fading. “When did that happen?”

He did not answer.

Batuuli took a slice of poppy cake and offered the tray to Azrael. “I wish things were different between us. I do. Truthfully, I cannot say I would ever try to make them different…but I wish they were.”

He stared at her without forgiveness a long time, but when she only continued to hold the cakes, he ultimately took one.

“Do eat something,” Batuuli urged, affecting a little pout as she offered the cakes to Lan. “I’ve gone to such trouble.”

“Why?” Azrael asked.

“Why not? It’s something to do. And she does have a certain rough charm.” Batuuli set the cakes down in front of Lan and poured herself some more tea. “We talked the other day, you know. When you sent her to me. I thought that might have been why you did it, because while I can’t say I enjoyed our conversation, I did think for some time afterward how long it had been since I last had one. A real one, I mean. And I thought of you, Father.”

“Me.”

“Oh, my courtiers talk. That’s why you gave them to me, isn’t it? To be my companions.” Batuuli affected a sigh. “But they say only what they have heard me say, reflecting my moods like so many mirrors. I am tired of seeing my own face.”

Some of the hard light in Azrael’s eyes dimmed.

“But your little plaything has no fear. She speaks her mind and genuinely does not care what happens to her. Look!” Batuuli turned to Lan. “What do you think of me?”

“I think you’re very unhappy.”

“And I am!” said Batuuli, turning wide eyes back on Azrael.

“But you don’t want to say so, so you say you’re bored instead.”

Batuuli waved at her. “That’s enough.”

“And you try to alleviate your boredom by being sadistic and hateful.”

“I said, enough!”

“And you’ve gotten so good at it that you can’t help but realize you are sadistic and hateful, which only makes you more unhappy,” she concluded, refusing to drop her eyes.

Batuuli glared at her for some time, but then suddenly seemed to throw it off. Plucking up her cup, she gestured toward Lan with it. “You see what I mean? Maddening, but one sees the appeal. And I can’t help but wonder…if I can feel this way after, what? Twenty years? Thirty? What must you feel, Father? How long has it been since anyone has dared to contradict you? Not out of hate, as I do, but simply because—” She spread her arms, smiling. “—you’re wrong?”

Azrael ate his cake, faceless behind his mask.

“And did it excite you to hear it? Infuriate, yes, of course, how dare she and so forth, but was it not thrilling all the same to hear her speak to you as if you were just another man?” Batuuli looked at him, then reached across the table and laid her hand over his. “Did she look at you, your naked face, and see…just another man?”

Azrael did not answer.

Batuuli’s gaze dropped to her hand on his. Her fingers slipped up his arm and down again in an unmistakable caress. “Did she touch you the same way?”

“Stop it,” said Lan.

Batuuli glanced at her, then gave her a longer, more thoughtful stare. “Tell me,” she said, pulling her hand back from Azrael to rest her chin on it. “Have you ever whored yourself before you came here?”

“Of course I have. Everyone has.”

Azrael glanced at her, frowning.

Batuuli raised one delicate eyebrow. “Every woman a whore in Norwood?”

“Every woman, every man. Sex is a commodity. Everyone sells it.”

Batuuli returned her sweet smile to Azrael. “Is that why you sent her away, Father? Did she make you remember she was a whore? Or did she make you forget?”

“Your morning conversation leaves much to be desired, but you rouse me to some curiosity, daughter.” His head tipped, as if to prove it. “Which of those possibilities did you imagine would hurt me?”

“Oh, I have far better ways to hurt you. When it happens, you won’t have to ask.” Batuuli snapped her fingers. One of her handmaidens rushed up to pour her a glass of water with ice, mint leaves and a wedge of some yellow fruit. Batuuli picked the fruit out, started to set it aside, then glanced at Lan…and instead squeezed it so its juice squirted out in a narrow stream. Lan ducked, but she wasn’t the target. The pikeman hanging over her let out a raspy scream, pale juice trickling down his flayed chest and soaking into his many open wounds. “You taught me so well how to hurt others,” Batuuli went on, studying the pikeman’s restrained contortions. “I can only presume it must make you happy to see me follow in your wake.”

“And does it make you happy?” Azrael asked, holding out his own cup to be filled. He paid the pikeman in his agony no more attention than he paid the handmaiden who poured his wine. “I have only ever desired my Children to be happy.”

“The only happiness I feel comes from knowing you will always remember how much I hated you.”

“How unfortunate for you.”

“Unfortunate only that I didn’t always, as your new toy was good enough to remind me, but if I must suffer the knowledge that you will always remember that once I looked on you with innocent love, at least I have the satisfaction of knowing you also saw it die.” Batuuli tried to smile. “When was that, Father? Tell me. I want to know the day, the hour, that I knew you for what you were.”

“What am I?”

“You are a jackal. You are the lord of carrion and a thief of bones.”

“And you are my daughter.”

“Your daughter?” She laughed—a sound as sharp and venomous as a snake-bite. “I would not be your child if I were given any choice.”

“What child chooses to be born?”

“I was not born. I died. And you, you jackal, you dug me up and dragged me to your den and expected me to love you for it. ”

“And you did,” he said. “If only briefly.”

“I hope that memory warms you, Father.” Batuuli paused, then laughed and relaxed into the high back of her chair. “It fact, it should be all but burning in you by now. Do you feel it yet?”

Confused, Lan looked at Azrael, but he did not look back at her. He continued to gaze, silent, impassive, at his daughter as seconds stretched out, measured only by the pikeman’s groans and weakening struggles. When he moved at last, it was merely to set down his cup and stand.

“Yes, you should be going,” Batuuli said, manufacturing a frown even as her eyes danced with pleasure. “You’ll want privacy for what’s about to happen. It wouldn’t do to have your fawning subjects see their glorious lord purge himself in public.”

“Lan,” said Azrael. “Get out.”

She got up so fast, she bumped the impaled pikeman; he groaned, fresh blood and clear drops of juice drooling from a dozen wounds. Stammering apologies, Lan fled for the door.

“It is a pity you didn’t eat anything,” Batuuli called after her. “It’s all poisoned.”

Lan swung around.

Batuuli shrugged one round shoulder, indifferent to her gape or Azrael’s burning stare. “I thought it would be amusing to watch you die. And then, of course, to see you come back. I’m quite sure he’d raise you up, even though you are rather plain…but then you’d only hate him for it with such an honest hate that he might actually let you die.” Batuuli drank, smiling around her glass. “And that would be amusing, too.”

Azrael turned his back on her and headed for the door, taking Lan’s arm as she stood, frozen, in his path.

“It’s been a lovely visit, Father.” Batuuli waved them off and tossed her half-empty glass to shatter on the floor. “I’ll see you at dinner, then?”

He did not answer, but pulled Lan with him, taking such long, swift strides that she was forced to run to keep pace, hiking her long skirts up around her knees. As soon as he was through Batuuli’s doors, he swung her around and demanded, “Did you eat anything?”

“No, but…but she didn’t really poison it, did she?”

“You!”

A lone servant polishing the long tiled corridor paused and looked up. “My lord?”

Azrael pushed Lan forward. “Take her to the library and summon Deimos to my chamber.”

The servant left her cleaning and got up at once, taking Lan’s right arm as Azrael released the left.

“She didn’t, did she?” Lan insisted, alarmed. “I mean, it was all for you! She wouldn’t poison you! You’re her only family!”

He looked at her, his eyes blazing through the sockets of his mask. Then he pushed past her and continued up the hall alone. He staggered, turned a corner and was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A ‘library’ turned out to be a room where books were read. The fact that people used to have so many books that they needed a whole separate room just to store them, much less a word for the room, said everything Lan guessed she needed to know about the way the world used to be. In Norwood, loose pictures and salvaged magazines were locked up like other valuables. The mayor had a few books, including the town ledger where Lan’s own name had been written on the day of her birth and presumably crossed out along with her mother’s the day she’d left, but all of them together could have fit on one shelf. Here was a room the size of the dining hall, two stories tall and lined in bookshelves, with ladders on runners along every wall so that no shelf was out of reach. These were books that could not be measured in hundreds or even thousands, but in some greater number that had no name.

If only she knew how to read.

Lan wandered through the stacks for a while, pulling out books at random and turning pages. She found some with pictures, but even the ones with just words were worth looking at, if only because someone somewhere wrote them once.

Hours passed, each one a little slower than the last. Overwhelmed by books, Lan looked at the windows instead, which were made from shards of colored glass put together to make pictures of things like trees and peacocks and even people. She investigated desk drawers. She rode the ladders. At length, she went over and opened the door.

The Revenant standing on the other side looked at her. Not a pikeman, a Revenant.

She closed the door. Stood there. Slowly, she opened it again.

He looked at her with no more curiosity, but just a hint of annoyance.

“Can I go to my room?” Lan asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer, just stared at her with that faintly impatient expression.

“What if I need the toilet?”

“Do you?”

“I will eventually.”

His lips thinned. He closed the door and locked it.

Some time later, as Lan was looking at pictures in a book that didn’t have nearly enough of them, the door opened again. The Revenant directed a short line of servants inside—one carrying a covered tray, the other holding a pitcher, the last with a chamberpot and a pail of ashes.

Lan lifted the cover on the tray, releasing a fragrant puff of steam. A bowl of soup and a split loaf of buttered bread with honey. “Where did this come from?” she asked.

“It’s been tasted,” the Revenant replied.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You didn’t really want to know what you asked. You wanted to know what I told you.” He stood aside as the servants withdrew, then shut the door and locked it.

Lan picked up the bowl and sniffed. Onions, herbs and some kind of fish. Her mouth watered, but she put it back untasted. There was water in the pitcher, flavored with chunks of fruit and mint leaves, chilled with ice. Actual ice. She didn’t taste that either. She was hungry and a lifetime of never knowing when or what the next meal might be made even this simple fare look like a feast, but the word poison still muttered itself in the back of her mind. She didn’t doubt the Revenant’s word, but not every poison acted fast. Better to go hungry and stay safe.

Lan covered up the food so she didn’t have to see it and be tempted more than she already was. Then she found a sofa clear across the room with a window low enough that she could see through. The view was that of rain and Azrael’s greenhouses, tinted improbable shades of purple and blue, but she watched anyway. Behind the glass, she could just make out figures moving inside, working hard to keep food on the imperial table.

If she were home, she’d be breathing in that green stink of sweat, soil and manure. If she were home, she would be out there already—sowing, weeding, picking and clearing, until her body was a thousand different points of pain coming together as one exhausted ache. If she were home…but she was here.

She watched until she had mostly forgotten the food, then found herself another book with pictures and sat down to pass the time.

The rain got heavier as the day wore on, so that it started feeling like an hour before dusk long before the pale shape of the sun reached its zenith. Lan’s hunger reached its own peak about the same time (it, too, was a weirdly nostalgic feeling. Sometimes it seemed that she had done nothing but eat since coming to Haven), but her stomach’s complaints eventually quieted and she forgot about them. She drowsed, taking more and more time to look at pictures she then could not remember and which eventually, she couldn’t even see unless she sat right in the window and tilted it up to the palest panel.

Daylight failed. The electric lamps of Haven lit, whole blocks at a time. It was beautiful, the way they said cities used to be, and Lan watched them for a long time, just glittering. But the view could only hold her interest for so long and it was too dark even to pretend to read, so she curled up on the sofa and tried to sleep.

She must have been at least partially successful, because although she got no real sense of rest, the next time she opened her eyes, the room was black and the rain had nearly stopped. She sat up, wondering fuzzily if she was awake or not. She did not remember her dreams, as a rule, but knew that she had them and if she was in one right now, how would she know? It felt like a dream. The library’s stillness was unnaturally complete. Not even the air was moving. In the dark, all the books in their shelves and even the scattering of tables and chairs had a flat, painted-on quality, making her feel as if she were trapped in a paper room, a dollhouse. And when she looked at the window, Lord Solveig was standing just outside, looking in at her through the colored glass.

It was not alarming. She had decided she was dreaming and was therefore removed from fear. And after all, it wasn’t as though he were floating. The library was on the ground floor and the windows, particularly the colored ones, were oversized. He wasn’t doing anything creepier than standing outside and watching her, which would be creepy enough in real life, but she expected better from a dream.

As if prompted by this thought, Solveig began to walk along the wall. She could hear the crunch of gravel beneath his boots and the wet squeaking sound as he trailed one hand along the wet glass until he ran out of window and passed out of sight.

Lan waited for a while, but that appeared to be it. Her dreams were boring. Small wonder she didn’t remember them. She lay back down on the sofa and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the sun was just coming up, slowly filling the room with that sickly grey light folks called dawn. Stiff and a bit headachy, Lan sat groggily staring at yesterday’s pitcher of water, weighing her thirst against the probability of poison until she convinced herself that it really didn’t matter because those little chunks of fruit and leaves that had been so cheery when they were fresh were now floating there, all waterlogged and warm, and while that didn’t make the water any more or less poisoned than it already might be, it did make it disgusting.

She got up, scratching the tangles out of her hair, and went over to the library door. There was still a Revenant on the other side of it. “Can I go back to my room yet?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My orders are to hold you until my lord alone grants release.”

“Fuck it, I’m going,” Lan muttered and took one step. Just one. Then she was looking down the curved gleaming blade of a sword.

“My orders are to hold you,” he told her, “until my lord alone grants release.”

“So, what?” Lan asked incredulously. “If I don’t let you keep me safe, you’ll kill me?”

He didn’t answer, but he plainly didn’t see a conflict either.

She stepped back and slammed the door.

Another day, stuck in this stupid room. It shouldn’t matter. Rationally, she knew she’d be just as stuck in the Red Room if she were there. The library was bigger, warmer, drier, with more comfortable seating and certainly had more to look at, but damn it, she hated having nothing to do. If Azrael thought she was in so much danger, why didn’t he shut her up in a cell somewhere? There had to be a dungeon here. And if she wasn’t in danger, why couldn’t he at least put her to work somewhere? She’d almost rather be cleaning the library than just lying around in it.

Almost.

Lan tried to pace her restlessness and resentment away, but soon found herself circling yesterday’s food and water. To keep her mind off it, she went to the furthest side of the library and rode the ladder back and forth. That worked for a little while, but as it got lighter, the idea that she ought to be working got harder and harder to ignore.

In the kind of inspiration that only being bored and unsupervised can evoke, Lan pushed two tables together and began to pull books off the shelves with the intention of building a little fort. It was harder than it looked. What should have been a simple matter of stacking books evolved into a process of first sorting them into like sizes and then layering them in an overlapping pattern against a stabilizing backdrop of a curtain she had pulled down and draped over the tables, with the largest, heaviest books arranged all along the bottom in a footer to keep the curtain as flat and straight as possible. She was nearly done and already eying the closest end tables for a likely volunteer to be a second story when the doors opened.

The dead man who entered was dressed neither as a guard nor a servant, just a man in a suit. He wore a tie and had a black leather case in one hand, squarish and hard, not big enough to be terribly useful to Lan’s eye. He looked like a man in an old magazine, the kind who worked at jobs no one had anymore.

He somehow switched on the overhead lights as he entered, then glanced around and saw Lan. His head cocked. “I say, that’s marvelous,” he said.

“It’s not finished,” Lan heard herself reply inanely. She looked back at the window where a curtain ought to be hanging and shuffled awkwardly to her feet. “I can put it all back. I mostly remember where it goes.”

“There’s no hurry, is there?” The dead man put his case down on a table, shrugged out of his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Unbuttoning his cuffs, he rolled up his sleeves and came over to join her. “What are we about?”

“I was…going to put another one on top.”

“Capital.” The dead man scouted around and lit on a desk. He pointed, raising an eyebrow at her inquiringly.

“Who are you?”

“Master Lareow is the name I’ve been given, but I don’t much care for it.” He offered his hand to shake.

Beginning to feel as though this, too, were a dream, Lan tentatively shook it. His hand was cold and very smooth. “And…sorry, but who are you?”

“Lareow, which is to say, it isn’t, but that’s the name I’ve been given and I answer to it.”

“What is it really?”

“Wickham,” he said after a long, assessing pause. “Master Wickham, if you like. I’m your lessons master. I’ll be tutoring you during your stay. Shall we?”

He went over to take one end of the desk, more or less forcing Lan to take the other, and between them, they muscled it up and on top of her book-fort. Then he went to the shelves for more bricks and Lan was left to stare after him, trying to make sense of his last words.

“What sort of lessons?” she asked finally, because all she could think was that she hadn’t done her dollying right and this was some sort of sexual thing, all ‘lick this’ and ‘wiggle that’, and she wasn’t sure whether to be insulted yet or grateful.

“Well, that’s to be determined. Our first step will be to assess your present level of education and then we’ll work out a curriculum, but I’m very open, as a rule. Have you some interest or area of study on which you’d like to focus?”

“No. What? No.”

“You needn’t feel embarrassed to ask. Lord Azrael encourages his companions to develop hobbies. Architecture, perhaps?”

“What’s that?”

“Building design.” He gestured at the fort that had somehow become a team effort and began to lay in a row of books around the base of the second story. “It’s one of my own interests, as a matter of fact, and I consider myself quite the amateur authority.”

It had never occurred to her that the dead might have interests, amateur or otherwise. Lan watched him build walls around the desk, alternating fat books with skinny ones and occasionally setting one of the really big ones in with the cover facing out, like a window. He even knocked up a dormer in front where the desk was open. Last of all, he set a lamp on the very top in the corner for a chimney.

“Right,” he said, stepping back to admire the end result before gesturing toward the table where he’d left his case. “Shall we have at it?”

Lan sat and watched curiously as he opened his case and brought out two more books, blank ones. Well, hers was blank. His had handwriting in it, but he flipped through until he came to the blank part. Then he brought out a pen and bottle of ink for himself and a pencil for her, already sharpened. He dipped his nib, wrote a few lines in comfortable silence, then gave her a pleasant smile and said, “Your name?”

“Lan. Lanachee,” she amended, because this felt very formal. “I don’t have a last name. Bit of a bastard.”

“Quite all right, I don’t have a first name,” he replied. “Bit of dead. Spell it out for me, please?”

She did nothing. There was nothing she knew to do.

After a moment, he looked up from his book and tapped at hers. “Please,” he said again.

Slowly, Lan picked up her pencil. She touched it to the page, near the top. When he merely sat there smiling at her, she bent her neck and stared at the paper. After a while, she made a few lines and looked at him. His smile was unchanged. She made a few more. Added a loop. Put a full stop at the end. And put her pencil down.

“All right,” he said gently and wrote another line or two in his own book. “How are you at sums?”

“Some of what?”

“If I have two pencils and you give me three more, how many pencils do I have?”

“Five,” replied Lan. “But I don’t know what you think I’d be doing with so many bloody pencils lying about.”

“The wall of a certain greenhouse is made from glass panels—”

“They all are, mate.”

“I believe you’ve mispronounced ‘Master Wickham’ there, but that’s all right. Our lord has arranged for someone else to help you with your elocution. Now. This particular wall is four panels tall and twelve panels long. How many panels are needed to create an entire wall?”

“Vents or doors?”

“Not in this case.”

“Forty-eight.”

“The greenhouse can hold six rows of ten plots each. You can plant four beans on each plot or one marrow. If you plant sixteen marrows, how many beans do you plant?”

Lan peered at him. “You don’t know much about farming, do you? You plant them both together with a sprout of corn. The beans climb the corn and the marrow grows on the bottom.”

“Tomatoes and marrow, then.”

Lan did the figuring. “A hundred and…say fifty to be sure. They won’t all take.”

He wrote in his book. “What are clouds made of?”

Lan shrugged. “Weather?”

“What is the surface of the moon like?”

“Snowy, I reckon. Looks snowy.”

“Name a component of the circulatory system.”

“I don’t know. Circles?”

“Sheep are to wool as hens are to what?”

“Eggs and feathers.”

“Explain?”

“Sheep are covered in wool and hens are covered in feathers. Sheep give wool and hens give eggs.”

He wrote and then closed his book and smiled at her. “That’s enough for now. I’ll need a few days to design a lesson plan and then I’ll be back.”

“For what?”

“To begin with, I’ll be teaching you to read.”

“What in the hell for?” Lan sputtered. “I don’t need to know reading!”

“No? Why not?”

She didn’t know how to answer, but only because the reason seemed so self-evident. It wasn’t that reading itself was pointless. She could see the sense of it, but only in the same way she could see the sense of glazing or smithing; it was a useful skill for a community to possess, not an individual, much less many individuals in the same community. The very fact that there was someone whose sole function was to teach reading made it completely unnecessary for anyone else to learn.

But although these thoughts were clear enough in her head, Lan couldn’t find the words and had to settle for the profoundly inadequate: “Because.”

“I see. Once you learn to read,” he went on, repacking his case, “we can begin a proper course of studies. We’ll be meeting here every morning after breakfast, concluding at six o’clock on full days, one o’clock on half days. You may address me as Master Wickham or as Sir, but you needn’t apply honorifics every time you speak. I’m not overly strict about such things. Shall I call you Lan or Lanachee?”

“Why do I have to have lessons at all? You know I’m just his dolly, right?”

His polite smile softened. “You’re alive, Lan,” he said. “You’re not ‘his’ anything.” And as she stared at him, he rose and put out his hand for her to shake again.

Again, she shook it.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said and left. “All yours,” she heard him say and in through the door came a dead woman pushing a trolley. On the trolley was a coffee service and no sooner did Lan clap eyes to it than the smell hit.

She hopped up eagerly, in spite of that nagging twinge that tried to tell her it might be poison, and the dead woman snapped, “Sit down.”

Lan sat.

“Don’t plop. Do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“Stand up. Keep your back straight.”

Slowly, Lan stood.

“Now sit.”

“Lady, make up your mind.”

“Sit!”

Lan sat.

“No slouching! Keep your back straight. Do it again!”

Lan eyed the coffee and the assortment of covered dishes accompanying it and heaved herself grudgingly to her feet. She opened her arms in a broad happy now? gesture and sat for the third bloody time.

The dead woman sniffed and began to set things out on the table. There was a lot of silverware. Since it looked like she’d be at it for a while, Lan reached for the coffee and immediately got her hand slapped. She had to watch as the trolley was entirely unpacked onto the table and all she could do about it was stand up and sit down a half-dozen times more because she kept fidgeting.

“Now,” the dead woman began, taking the last item off the trolley—a long, thin switch—and holding it ominously over Lan. “I will be instructing you in etiquette—”

“What’s that?”

Swwwap, went the switch, laying a stinging stripe across Lan’s back, just below her shoulder blades. She leapt up with a howl and the dead woman brought the switch down again, this time with a barked, “Sit!”

Lan sat, both hands gripping her back as far as she could reach, which was not far enough to touch the pain, not that she was sure she wanted to. She stared up with wide eyes as the dead woman folded her arms and sniffed at her, the tip of the switch twitching like the tail of a hunting cat.

“Etiquette is another word for manners. Manners,” she added with undisguised snideness, “are polite behaviors separating civilized societies from those like yours, such as the behavior of not interrupting when someone is speaking. Sit up straight and close your mouth. Keep your hands folded in your lap unless you are eating. When you eat, you may rest your wrists on the table.”

“Can I learn this from the other bloke?”

Swwwap, went the switch. Lan let out a yell, earning herself another stripe, but she managed to keep her seat and spare herself a third.

“Napkins,” announced the dead woman. “Napkins are not ornamental. You must use your napkin at every meal. When presented with a napkin ring, remove it and place it to the left of your plate. If it is presented folded, unfold it in a smooth motion without,” she stressed, glaring at Lan, “snapping or shaking it. Now. Pick up your napkin.”

Lan obeyed, fussing it open in a distinctly unsmooth motion. She held it tensely in her fist, watching the switch.

“Now set it on the table to the right of your plate. Never use your napkin to wipe or rub at your face, but only in a blotting motion. Blot your lips before drinking to avoid leaving lipstick on your cup.” The dead woman poured Lan a cup of coffee and set that firmly before her. “Drink.”

Lan eyed the cream and sugar, then the switch. She picked the cup up.

“Wrong!” barked the dead woman. “What did I just say to you?”

“You said drink!”

“I said blot your lips before you drink!”

“I’m not wearing bloody lipstick, am I?”

Swwwap, went the switch. “Ladies do not say bloody and they do not raise their voices at the table! Now drink!”

Lan snatched up her napkin, slapped it against her mouth a few times, then grabbed her cup and gulped it dry.

The dead woman pinched the bridge of her nose for a second or two, then suddenly pulled out the tutor’s chair and sat down. She kept her back straight. “My job,” she said tightly, “is to teach my lord’s whores to comport themselves like ladies. This is my job because he has raised me to this purpose and to no other. One can only assume he did this because he has no desire for the company of whores who act like mannerless swine, such as yourself.”

As she said this, and without taking her eyes from Lan’s, she reached across the table and poured Lan another cup of coffee. “I can only teach,” she said, placing the cup back on its saucer. “I cannot force you to learn. My place in Haven is assured either way. Yours is dependent upon our lord’s favor. I have seen dozens like you, who think they have only to open their legs and close their eyes and make no other effort. I have seen them turned out, begging with every breath for another chance. Our lord gives no second chances. Drink.”

Lan picked up the napkin and patted at her lips, then picked up the cup and sipped through her clenched jaws.

“We will meet here every other day at two o’clock until four o’clock. You will learn how to walk, how to sit and stand, how and when to speak, how to eat and, if our lord desires you to learn, how to dance.” The dead woman gestured to a bowl of breads. “Take a roll and place it on the smaller dish to the left of your plate.”

Lan obeyed. “Where is Azrael? Will I see him today?”

“It is none of your concern. When he desires your company, he will send for you. This is your breadknife. Pick it up and hold it between your thumb and forefinger. Under no circumstance should you hold any utensil in your fist. Using your breadknife, take some butter and place it on your bread plate. Never butter your bread directly from the butter dish.”

“Is he all right?”

“Our lord is eternal.”

“But when you saw him, did he look all right?”

It seemed to Lan that the dead woman hesitated and that her cool tone was touched by the thinnest crack of resentment when she said, “I do not speak directly with our lord. His orders were carried to me.”

“By who?”

“Whom.”

“Who’s that?”

“By whom, you illiterate—! By Deimos, captain of the Revenant Guard. Pay attention! Break off small portions of bread when you wish to eat them and butter them individually with your breadknife. Under no circumstances are you to butter your entire roll and, my God!” she cried suddenly, switching Lan’s hand three times in rapid succession. “Never lick your knife!”

“Ouch! Fine! Buggering fuck! Leave off with that beshitted thing!”

The dead woman let out a sound like the chirping of a bird, staring at her with an indignation that was nearly horror. “Ladies,” she sputtered at last. “Ladies do not say bugger or fuck!”

“But beshitted’s all right?” Lan asked cautiously.

“No, it is not!”

“You know, I may not be as mannered-up as you are, but in Norwood, it’s rude to yell at the table.”

The dead woman actually hung her mouth open for a second or two before snapping it shut. Lips tightly pressed together, she uncovered a bowl of porridge and set it on the plate before Lan. “Pick up your spoon,” she said tersely. “Always taste your food before adding salt, spices or sweeteners, so as not to insult the cook or the host.”

“Can I talk to Deimos?” Lan asked, taking a healthy bite of porridge.

“May I. The question is not whether you can, but whether you may.”

“Whatever! Can I talk to him or not—ow!”

“One does not reach for things across the table,” the dead woman informed her as Lan shook the sting out of her switched hand. “One asks for objects to be passed.”

“Pass the bloody honey! Ow!”

“Ladies do not say bloody. If you wish to speak with the captain,” the dead woman continued, passing the pot of honey, “I will send him word after our lesson, if and only if I am satisfied with your performance. Whether or not he chooses to meet with you is none of my affair. Shall we proceed?”

Lan looked at the table, where half a dozen covered dishes and at least as many untouched utensils remained, each one a trap armed with switches. How badly did she want to know about Azrael? For that matter, how badly did she want to eat?

“Please pass the cream,” she said sullenly.

“Keep your back straight and chin up. Smile. A lady must be pleasing to others in attitude and in appearance at all times.” The dead woman picked up the cream and held it. “Again.”

Lan pasted on a fierce grin. “Please pass the—” Bloody. “—cream.”

The dead woman passed it. “And now we say…?”

Lan considered her options, still smiling. “Thank you.”

“Good.” The dead woman took both cream and honey back and placed them out of Lan’s reach. “Now do it again.”

* * *

The day passed. The rain came and went, sometimes in noisy gusts against the colored glass and sometimes drip by lingering drip off the eaves. In the greenhouses, Azrael’s workers went back and forth about their business regardless of the weather. Sometimes Lan stood at the windows and watched them. Sometimes she sat in her fort and looked at books.

The servants came and went inside as well. They brought tea and biscuits at one point, which Lan ate without any bloody manners at all. They took away her chamberpot and replaced it with a clean one twice. They brought dinner on a tray and a bottle of wine when the sun got low and came back at full dark to clear her mess away. They brought a fresh dress and laid it out for the morning. They brought a pitcher of water and a clean glass in case she got thirsty in the night. They ignored Lan save to answer only those questions it was their job to answer, like, “What is that?” (it was creamed spinach) and “Can I go to the toilet?” (no), but if they could answer with a nod or a shake of the head, they did. If they didn’t have to look directly at her, they didn’t. If she stepped in front of them, they went around.

She felt invisible and before long had stopped even trying to chat them up. So when the library door opened after dark, she didn’t even bother coming out of her fort to see who it was, trusting them to leave their drink or basin or blanket or whatever the hell it was they were leaving and get out. They weren’t here to make friends with her, clearly, and she wasn’t here to make friends with them.

The sound of boots clumping over the wooden floors was no immediate distraction. The Revenant who guarded the door frequently came inside to oversee the servants. It wasn’t until they came all the way over to Lan’s book-fort that she looked up from the pictures and saw Deimos.

“You asked for me,” he said.

She had and she still wanted to talk to him, but for a moment, she could only sit there. Here was the man who had gone to Norwood on Azrael’s orders. That was the sword that had perhaps been drawn in her village, used on the necks of men and women and children she had grown up alongside. Those were the boots he had cleaned of Norwood’s mud. Those were the gloves he had washed of Norwood’s blood.

He waited, showing no impatience or concern on his handsome, dead face.

Lan closed her book and crawled out of the fort to stand up. “Is Azrael all right?” she asked.

“Our lord is eternal.”

“I was with him when he was poisoned.”

“Yes.”

“Is he all right?” she pressed.

“Our lord is eternal.”

“For fuck’s sake, you people! Is he awake? Is he talking? Can he walk? How bloody bad off is he?”

“It is not for me to say.”

“I was with him! Do you not get that? You’re not giving away any secrets. I was right there!”

“Yes.”

“I already know he was poisoned! I know he’ll survive, just tell me…” Lan lifted a hand and held it stupidly up for a second, but the right words failed to pour into her palm. She let it drop. “Is he all right?”

“Our lord is eternal.”

“Can I see him?”

“No.”

“May I?” Lan asked desperately. “May I see him? Please?”

“No. Is there anything else?”

“What really happened in Norwood?”

“I obeyed my lord’s command.”

“Did you kill anyone?”

Leather creaked as he flexed his fingers on the hilt of his sword. If it was a sign of annoyance, it was the only one. His face betrayed no emotion and his voice was perfectly calm as he said again, “I obeyed my lord’s command.”

Lan’s shoulders slumped, defeated. “Go on, then.”

He turned and marched himself away.

Lan watched him go until the door shut behind him, then stared at her fort until her eyes began to burn. There was no sound in the library, no sound but the rain. She picked up the book she’d been looking at and put it back on the shelf. She put them all back, shoving them in wherever they would fit. She hung the curtain back in the window. She left the desk stacked atop the tables, but switched off the lamp that had been a chimney, if only for one afternoon. She sat down on her sofa and folded herself over against its cushions. She closed her eyes and listened to the rain until, unhappily, she slept.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Funny, how quickly new became normal. Lan had first had this thought sitting in a ferry between one forgettable town and the next—she, who had never been more than a deer-hunt’s distance beyond Norwood’s walls in all her life, became an expert in haggling rides and hostel beds in just a few days. Before that first month was out, she had imagined herself grown hard, a living reflection of her mother’s youth. Now, in her new normal, she could barely remember what that life had been like and the more she became aware of that distance, the more time she spent at the window, staring out at the greenhouses and wishing she were a part of them, of that life, rather than this indoors one where she did nothing.

She’d never had nothing to do before. Even on the long journey from Norwood, waiting still felt like something, because she knew what she was waiting for. This open-ended silence in which she expected every day to see Azrael come through the library door and never did was every bit as poisonous as the pastries on Batuuli’s table.

She got used to living in the library. She did not count the days, although there weren’t many and they came easily broken by lessons and food that came as regular as the clock on the wall chimed. There was no company, as such, but Master Wickham wasn’t so bad, for a dead man, and even her etiquette lessons were better than boredom, which was, for Lan, the worst part of her confinement. The sofa where she slept each night was padded, but firm and not quite long enough to accommodate her, which made a perfect smudging point between the opulent bed in the Red Room (or Azrael’s room, but no, she wasn’t going to think about that) and her old camp bed in Norwood. She wasn’t happy. It wasn’t home. But it was as good a place to wait as any for the next new normal.

It came in the night, or at least, that was how it seemed. She’d been fighting a headache all morning and it finally got the better of her during her etiquette lessons. Unable to concentrate on the dead woman’s orders (after all these days, she still hadn’t given a name), scarcely able to hear them through the sick throb of her skull, Lan took one too many hits with the switch. In the resulting scuffle, somehow the teapot got broken on the dead woman’s face, so Lan got an early day. She went back to bed, trying to sleep away the headache before it put down roots and took over her entire body.

She slept too deeply. She neither heard approaching footsteps nor felt the threat of another presence, but needed a hand physically touching her to wake up.

She forgot she was on the sofa and came up thrashing so violently, she fell off onto the floor, whacking her head first and then her butt and finally lying dazed with one foot still up on the cushions. Her headache was gone and there above her, as if taking its place, was Azrael.

“You look awful,” she heard herself say.

He acknowledged this with a humorless cough of a laugh and came around the sofa to sit. “I should.”

He did, although it was hard to say what exactly gave her that impression. He was wearing his horned mask, which fit over the top of his head, completely covered his face and neck, and fanned out over his shoulders. Only his eyes were exposed, sockets of fire that showed little emotion and certainly no weakness. Nevertheless, there was something about him that betrayed him, some invisible, indelible mark of exhaustion and strain, and when he took his mask off, she saw it even more clearly.

“You asked after me, I’m told,” he said.

“I was…”

“Yes?”

She didn’t know how to end that. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. “It really was poisoned,” she said instead.

“It really was,” he agreed. “I told you attempts were made.”

“By your own daughter?”

“Who else could get close enough?”

Lan rolled onto her knees, her graceless fall forgotten, searching his face while he looked bemusedly back at her. “What did she use?”

“I don’t know. I tasted nothing, but I admit such was my mood at that meal that I only wanted to end it and be gone.” He watched without moving as she touched his chest, his throat, his cheek. “I suspect oleander.”

“What is that?”

“A tree. It’s pretty and therefore common enough. I’ve not seen any about the palace grounds, but she’s fond of walking in gardens, my Batuuli. There are many in Haven and she takes an active interest in the cultivation of all. She’s poisoned me with rhubarb leaves, jasmine berries, tea made of yew, moonseed, mistletoe, star of Bethleham, adenia, autumn crocus…no matter,” he said and smiled slightly. “It’s not the worst death.”

“It is. It’s awful.”

“Oh? And how many deaths have you endured?” He punctuated this with a derisive glance that became a pensive one. “What is it you’ve seen poisoned? Rats, I suppose.”

She nodded, reluctantly moving back from him and seating herself on a chair close by. “They’re always a problem in a small community like ours.”

“A problem, one assumes, because food is so scarce.” Azrael shook his head with a disdainful smile. “And so you poison the animals rather than trap and eat them.”

“Some people do eat them,” Lan replied. “And some of them are even okay. Most others get their parasites and their diseases. So we trap as many as we can, but once they get into the storehouses, it’s either poison them or lose a week’s worth of food every day. Have you ever seen anyone starve to death?”

“You forget I have starved for centuries.”

“Not to death. You’ve just been hungry. I’ve seen people starve, really starve. I’ve seen them wasted down to skin over bones, their bellies swollen up like they’re pregnant. Their skin dries up. They get open sores all over their bodies, but they don’t bleed. Their skin just splits open. One time, I saw a man pick his mother up and her skin just sloughed off her arms like they were sleeves. Did that ever happen to you?”

He never blinked, never flinched, but just when she thought he wouldn’t answer, he said, quietly, “No.”

“They get a smell, do you know that? They smell like bread. Because of the yeast in their gut, I guess. And they mold. They can’t move, you know, so they just lie there and in the wet weather, they actually mold. That’s how someone starves, Azrael. It’s not all sitting in the dark with your stomach hurting for a thousand years. It’s children lined up like matchsticks in a box, trying to drink soup thinner than fucking sweat and they can’t because the mold growing in their throats makes it too hard to swallow.”

Her voice cracked. She looked away, taking deep breaths until that hot knot in her chest went away and she could look at him again.

“So we set poison out,” she said. “At least a couple times a year, especially before we put up next year’s seed. And for any kid too little to work, it was their job to go up in the lofts and under the crawlspaces to pick up their bodies. I don’t know what they use, but it’s supposed to be quick.”

“Is it?”

Lan shook her head. “Not if they could get back up into the loft and clear across the village under the houses. And it wasn’t painless either.”

Azrael studied her face while she stared fixedly over his shoulder. “Nor, I think, was it only rats.”

“Sometimes stupid kids drink out of strange bottles.”

And to make sure it never happened to Lan, her mother had taken her to the home of just such a stupid child and made her watch the agonies of a boy whose name she no longer knew but whose final hour she would never forget. It had only been two days since he’d found the jar of what he’d thought was his father’s homebrew, but in that time, he’d pissed, puked, shit and sweated out half his weight. The wizened thing he had become had no more moisture to lose, but his wasted body kept trying to purge all the same. He’d retched up air and bloody flecks of foam, crying in raspy, tearless gasps as his mother washed him over and over and his father muttered in the next room about the waste of water. When the doctor had finally broken his neck, little Lan had cried—not because he was dead, but because she was glad he was dead.

Lost in these thoughts, she wasn’t sure just when she started staring at him again, but once she realized she was doing it, she didn’t look away. Pain and weariness had given his features a more human quality than they usually had…or maybe she just wanted to believe he had human qualities badly enough to imagine them.

“Does it still hurt?” she asked, since he seemed content to sit forever and watch her stare at him.

“The worst is past.”

“I didn’t know…”

“Yes?”

She didn’t know how to finish that either, but she couldn’t leave it be this time. “I didn’t know you could be hurt.”

“Does that comfort you?”

She could only shake her head, still staring at him, into him.

“Your concern is, as always, deeply touching.” His eyes shifted to his mask, there on the sofa beside him. With a sigh, he picked it up and put it on, then rose and offered his hand.

“Are…Are we going to bed?”

“To dinner.”

Her hand froze in the air, not quite touching his. “Dinner?”

“Calm yourself. She won’t try again so soon.” He took her wrist in a firm grip, pulling her from her seat and heading for the door. “I might develop a resistance and that would be an end to her fun.”

“Yeah, I don’t exactly share your confidence. Besides, it was me she was trying to kill.”

“Only as a means to hurt me.”

She stopped walking. “Would it?”

He gave her a none-too-gentle tug to get her moving again. “Would it what?”

“Hurt you. If I died.”

“The same, I suppose, as if I never tasted a peach again. There would be a lack.” He glanced at her and away. “Yet there are many fruits as sweet. Indeed, there are many even sweeter.”

The long walk through the palace was quiet after that. He kept a hold on her arm, releasing her only when they came to the open doors of the dining hall. Within, soft chatter and clinking glasses swelled, proof that the nightly feast had started without him, but there was quiet when Azrael entered. They all rose to bow, all save his Children, who ignored him.

Azrael touched Lan’s arm and headed for the dais at the far end of the hall. The captain of his Revenants, Deimos, waited there in front of the steps. Several other Revenants were posted around the room. In fact, there was one almost directly behind each of the Children…and two behind Batuuli, who had finally deigned to notice them. “How well you look,” she sighed.

“You might disguise your disappointment, daughter. For politeness’ sake.”

“Oh, well, manners are so very important.” Batuuli picked up one of her knives and played along the edge. “But you are the one who wears masks. I feel no need to hide my true face. Hello, dolly. Come and sit with me.” She swept her arm out as if in invitation, but her invitation ended with the knife slashing a courtier’s throat. He scrambled back, blood welling thickly between his fingers, and Batuuli pushed him carelessly to the floor. “I have an empty chair,” she finished.

Before Lan could respond, Azrael answered for her when his heavy hand closed over her shoulder. “Clean yourself up,” he told the courtier and walked on, keeping Lan firmly at his side.

“Now where are your manners?” Batuuli pouted, stabbing her knife into the tabletop as she watched her courtier crawl away. “I was playing with that.”

Azrael signaled his steward and pointed at the space beside his throne. “Bring a chair for my guest. Another chair,” he added as a servant moved toward the empty one beside Batuuli. “And send for my musicians.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“‘Yes, my lord,’” mimicked Batuuli. “One must have one’s musicians. How predictable you are.”

“I wouldn’t say that, sister,” Lord Solveig remarked. He had his arm around one of his courtiers, his forefinger tapping at her bare shoulder as he watched them come up the aisle. “I don’t recall him ever setting one of his whores at the imperial table before.”

“He doesn’t like it when you call her that,” Batuuli said as Azrael turned a burning eye on his son. “Which is amusing, since I don’t think she minds at all. She knows what she is.”

Azrael, one foot upon the dais stair, suddenly swung around and closed the distance between his daughter and himself in three swift strides. His fist struck the table, scattering her courtiers like partridges, but Batuuli never flinched as he leaned down, leaned close. “And what is she?” he demanded, not loudly.

The dead court watched and waited.

“She’s your dolly,” Batuuli said and smiled. “But then, aren’t we all?”

“I find myself uncharacteristically out of patience with you tonight, daughter, so I will say this only once.” Azrael straightened up, then slapped Batuuli across the face with force enough to knock her from her chair onto the tiles.

Solveig jerked back, tearing the sleeve of the courtier whose arm he’d been idly caressing. Even Tehya raised her head and blinked owlishly around.

Batuuli lay on the floor and laughed. “I’ll have to remember that particular recipe,” she called as Azrael turned his back on her and grimly beckoned Lan to him. “It’s put you in such a playful mood.”

Azrael ascended the dais and took his throne. Lan stood beside him, trying not to watch Batuuli’s courtiers help her back into her seat. She didn’t know where to aim her eyes or what to do with her hands. No one was staring at her, or at least, no one seemed to be, but she had never felt so conspicuous or so unwelcome.

‘This is not my fault,’ she told herself fiercely. ‘She hated him since before I was even born!’

So what was this feeling, this ominous pressure that built and built, not inside her but all around her? She was not imagining the unease she saw flickering like shadows on dead faces as Azrael’s court resumed their feasting, no more than she was imagining the Revenants in the room, their hands on weapons and cold eyes fixed on their lord’s own Children. No, it wasn’t her fault, how could it be? But she was part of it all the same.

The servants returned with a chair. The back was high, the seat padded, the feet had claws and the whole thing was brushed with gold. Not a chair, then. Another throne. And although it was difficult to tell through his mask, she thought Azrael saw it that way too. Still, he pointed when she hesitated, so she sat.

The musicians filed in and started up their unobtrusive song, every instrument in perfect harmony with every other, every note a knife on Lan’s ear. Otherwise, the hall was very quiet. Azrael’s court still feasted, or pretended to, but without the usual affectation of revelry. They were not watching their lord, but they were waiting, like she was, for some awful thing to happen and the collective force of all that waiting made it impossible to eat.

“You haven’t much appetite,” Azrael observed, watching her cut a ham steak into smaller and smaller portions.

“Neither have you.”

“I was poisoned recently. You weren’t.”

They were not speaking loudly, but such was the quiet that Batuuli answered for her with a cool, “I did my best. She wouldn’t eat.”

“You would do well not to remind me of your presence here,” said Azrael without looking at her. To Lan, in much the same tone, he said, “And you will not refuse my hospitality.”

“I’m not. I’m just…” She looked out at the hall, but the only one who would look back at her was Lady Tehya and as Lan locked eyes on her, Tehya reached up with her carving knife and drew a bloodless gash across her throat. “I’m not hungry.”

Azrael’s attention had wandered briefly toward his masked daughter, but now it came back, hard. “Am I here to bow before your wishes? I say you will not refuse me!”

“How am I supposed to eat when—”

At her lonely table, Tehya had reached into her wound and found a scarf. It came out and out and out, winding around her graceful hand, shiny wet and bright crimson, like blood woven into cloth.

“How am I supposed to eat?” Lan finished sickly.

“Think of all the starving children in Norwood.”

She rocked back, her mouth dropping open, but she couldn’t really believe he’d said that until she saw him smile. “You think that’s funny?” she demanded. “After everything I told you, you think that’s a fucking joke?”

A few heads turned.

“I take it you don’t.”

“What the hell is wrong with you? You…If you weren’t wearing that mask, I’d smack you!”

He leaned back, not quite laughing, then reached up and took it off.

The music came to a discordant halt. Servants scattered back and at least three people dropped their cups, but the shock of seeing their lord’s true face was nothing compared to the chaos when Lan punched it right in his smirking mouth.

His head rocked back. Every pikeman in the room came running, every Revenant drew a sword and Deimos leapt over the imperial table and threw Lan to the floor. She heard the shrill howl of his blade cut the air and then she heard Azrael bellow, “Stand down!”

A beat of silence and then boots retreated and chairs were retaken. Lan pushed herself to her hands and knees; Deimos hauled her the rest of the way to her feet and gave her a shove toward her seat. He kept his naked sword in his hand and his eyes, cold, on her.

Azrael watched her resettle. His lower lip had split slightly. She admired it, her heart burning with ugly pride.

“You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

“No.” He smiled; a bead of black blood welled up from his lip and dropped onto his chin. “Not when you knew all the ways I might be revenged, the very least of them being to throw you out with your purpose unmet.”

Her heart chilled at once and sank. She lifted her chin anyway. “Impale me, then. Go on. Stick me in your garden. You’ll never make me sorry.”

“Can’t I? But I am still enjoying you, child. If I choose to plant fresh flowers in my meditation garden—” Azrael leaned close to smile at her. “—I’ll pluck them in Norwood.”

She could only stare at him. This was the man she’d been waiting on all these days. This was the man she’d been thinking about, felt sorry for! This was the man…but he wasn’t a man. He was—

“You’re a monster.”

His smile opened into a blood-smeared grin.

Lan leapt up and Deimos immediately caught her by both arms. She scarcely noticed, although she needed the support. Her legs were shaking, not with terror but with a rage so powerful, it had seemed to rob her of her bones. “I don’t give a fuck what you look like, not one cold fuck! You’re a monster because you want to be!”

He stopped smiling.

Somewhere in that silent hall, Batuuli laughed.

Azrael put his mask back on. “Release her, Captain,” he said, picking up his cup. “Sit down, Lan.”

“Piss off.” She shook free of the Revenant and stormed from the dais.

The tables rippled with half-raised hands and turning heads, followed by a deafening stillness in which all that moved in the whole of the hall was Lan, marching for the door. Pikemen raised their weapons, sending uncertain glances toward the throne, but no one moved to stop her.

“I have not dismissed you.”

She kept going.

“You came here for a cause,” he reminded her. “Will you abandon it now for the sake of your pride?”

“My pride?” She swung around to face him, flinging out both hands. “Do I look like I’ve still got pride? After you put me in chains and you put me in bed and you put this stupid shit on me—” She scrubbed savagely at her face, taking smears of whore-paint off on her hands. “—I’m fresh out of fucking pride, but I’m not going to sit there and laugh along while you make jokes about my people dying!”

“I apologize.”

“Fuck you!” She stormed another two steps toward the door and turned belatedly back. “Wait, what?”

“They were cruel words and I apologize for them.” Azrael ignored the openly gaping faces aimed up at him and gestured to the empty chair beside him. “Come. Sit with me.”

“No,” said Lan, but not with the same force and she did not leave after she said it.

“Hm. If you will not allow me to take my words back, perhaps I could buy them. In pieces. Sit with me,” he said again, “and I will send what remains of tonight’s meal to Norwood.”

Lan’s eyes went to the table next to her by their own accord, seeing mountains of bread, slabs of pink salmon longer than her arm, whole roasted swans, towers of fruit glazed in honey and wine.

“I will even refrain from reminding you that I could have you back in chains at a word.” Azrael retook his throne and pointed at hers. “Such is the depth of my remorse.”

She scowled and returned to her seat under the Revenant captain’s icy stare. A servant poured her another cup of wine. After an awkward moment, the musicians resumed playing. Azrael watched them, ignoring her, and gradually, the others at the lower tables took up the pretense of eating again.

“It was a lousy thing to say,” Lan muttered, stabbing at her bread with her fork.

“It was.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgiven you, either.”

“I don’t.”

She glanced at him. He stared straight ahead at the flutist, one claw tapping out time against the edge of his untouched plate. His other hand was beneath the table, she saw, pressed to his side. Suddenly, it moved to his thigh; she raised her eyes to see him staring back at her.

Much as she tried to hold on to her anger, Lan could feel it slip away. Not entirely. Like the colored glass in the library, she could look at it or look through it and for now, she chose the latter. “You’re not all right, are you?”

His mouth twisted behind his mask. “I’ll live.”

Lan frowned. “That’s not funny, either.”

His smile, if it could be called that, faded. He returned his gaze to the musicians. “I am in considerable pain. Perhaps you like to hear that better.”

“No, I don’t like to hear that!” she snapped. “Why the hell would I? I didn’t want you to be poisoned!”

“I did,” Batuuli remarked. “I love to see him poisoned. I particularly love to see him try to pretend he doesn’t mind afterwards, just because he can survive it.”

“Well, you’re a bitch,” Lan said crossly.

“And you’re mortal.” Batuuli toyed with the hilt of the bloody knife that had already slit one throat this evening. “You should remember that, particularly since there are alternatives.”

“Enough,” said Azrael.

Batuuli smirked. “You see? My father’s preference is for the living—or rather, his perversion. I can sever you from his favor as easily as severing a vein.”

“I said, enough!” Azrael aimed his hand down at his daughter, silencing the entire hall, so that his voice, uncontested, was as good as a shout. “You threaten no one in my house, least of all in my presence. Mind your tongue or lose it!”

Batuuli’s hand rose to flutter at her throat, a theatrical gesture that nevertheless seemed genuine. “You were talking to me?”

Her courtiers went very still.

“Let it be, sister,” Solveig sighed, sipping at his wine. “He’s in a mood.”

But Batuuli ignored him, her beautiful surprise turning beautifully angry. “Mind my tongue?” she echoed. “Mine? But because hers has been at your cock, you let your mud-farming little whore scold me before the whole of your court?” She paused, then smiled. “Why, Father, if those are the rules, I can play. I’ll happily fuck you.”

Azrael recoiled.

Batuuli laughed at him, raising a hand to toy at the lacings of her bodice. “Why take pale satisfaction from your endless chain of warmblood whores when I am here to service you? Was that not your plan from the very start?”

“No.” The word seemed to leave him as the last breath of a stabbed man. His arm dropped. He lifted it again, palm open. “How can you…? Daughter!”

“Father,” Batuuli purred, her throat arched with sensual abandon. “Ah, Father! Fuck me, Father!”

“Stop this!”

Solveig laughed, a bit wonderingly. “That’s so disturbing and I can’t even say why.”

“Yes, why? Is this not the body you desired to be made eternal at your side, Father?” Batuuli caressed her graceful curves, then gripped at them crudely and leered. “Are these not the breasts you wished for me? Is this not the cunt?”

“Get out,” Azrael said hoarsely. “Guards!”

“Calm yourself, dear Father, I’ll go. But first, just let me ask, to satisfy my own curiosity…” She turned to the pikemen who had come to collect her. “If he desired to fuck me…would that be wrong?”

“Oh, well put,” Solveig murmured.

“Would you call the lust obscene that set our great lord’s cock inside me?” Batuuli pressed, smiling over her shoulder at her father. “Would you stop him if it was his will to have me? My brother? My sister? All of us together?”

The pikemen glanced at each other, then up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave no orders. He waited with the rest of the room, the rest of the world. “Our lord does no wrong,” one of them said at last.

Azrael leaned back into his throne and raised a hand to cover his eyes.

“So if it was his pleasure to set me on my knees before him and suck his cock, would you then allow it?” Batuuli took an ewer of cream from her table and stroked its long neck, licking and kissing at the opening, stealing kittenish sips with the very tip of her tongue as she slowly poured it out. “Would you smile to see me bathed in his blessing?” Cream overspilled her lips, trickled down her chin, splashed the swells of her breasts. She caught the last drop on her tongue and tossed the ewer indifferently away to shatter. “Would you not be honored to bear such a sight your witness?”

The dead man looked nervously up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave him no sign of his thoughts. “If it is my lord’s pleasure,” he said slowly.

Batuuli feigned bewildered hurt. “And why would I not give him pleasure?”

“I…yes.”

“But you hesitate! Am I not ten thousand times more comely than that creature who sits beside him? Should it not be me who embraces our glorious lord, the living god over all this dead Earth?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Tell him so.” Batuuli stepped back, extending her arm toward the imperial table and raising her voice to fill the hall. “Show him your love and devotion are greater than any petty laws of Men! His is the only law in Haven and if it is his will to take me, shall you not praise him for it? Shall you not applaud?”

And they did. Just one at first, tentative, then another and another, until the whole court was on their feet and cheering.

Batuuli turned on her father with a savage grin of triumph, tearing free of her gown and letting it fall around her like petals of a dying flower. She stood, perfection in its purest and most terrible form, and held out her open arms. “Come and fuck me, Father,” she called. “We’re all waiting.”

Throughout all this, Azrael gazed at Batuuli without expression. Only when the applause died and his court began to uncertainly reseat themselves, did he finally speak. “You were all that I desired in all the world. My first. My most beloved child. I cannot look at you without remembering the great promise of joy you once brought to my life.”

Batuuli huffed and tossed her braids. Her breasts shuddered, shaking cream in thin trickles down her dark skin. “I trust that fool’s fancy has died.”

“It has,” Azrael said, nodding once. “It finally has.”

And then he killed her.

He did it quietly, just a wave of one hand and she crumpled, cracking her skull on the edge of the dais as she fell. Her retinue scrambled away like birds startled into flight, but they didn’t go far. Then there was a second silence, a greater stillness.

Tehya stood. Slowly, silently, she opened her arms. She and Azrael faced each other and for so long as their eyes held, they might as well have been the only two in the room, in all the world.

Azrael broke the silence first, his voice as raw as a wound. “No. No, I will not. Not…Not unless you ask me.”

Tehya did not answer. Her open arms lifted, miming shackles for the rest of her body to hang by. Her head lolled. Her wide, staring eyes never left his.

“Will you not speak? My little bird…I would give you anything you asked to hear your voice once more…even your death.”

Tehya said nothing.

Azrael gazed at her a long time, taking breaths that shook his great frame harder and harder in silence. His hand raised, half-clenched, then swept through the air, cutting her down like a scythe through corn. She fell forward into her untouched dinner, the careful arrangement of her hair plopping into a silver tureen and sending a dark wave of gravy washing up around her ears and down her bodice.

“Now me.” Solveig shoved his chair back and pushed the courtier seated beside him to the floor, clearing the way between him and Azrael. He smiled, a grin of savage triumph. “I’ll ask. I’m ready. I’ve wanted nothing else for years!”

“Go.” Azrael picked up his cup in a hand that Lan saw shake, if only once. He put it down again untouched. “Please. My son, please go.”

“Now me!” Solveig leapt up, chin high and blue eyes blazing. “All my brothers and sisters are dead! You’ve killed them all, you son of a diseased whore, now me! Grave-fucker! Bone-picking bastard! Haven’t I given you enough to be sorry for?” He looked wildly around, then pulled the sword from a Revenant’s sheath and ran, not for Azrael, but for Lan.

She never had time to react, but somehow Deimos did. His sword flashed, intercepting the other blade with a ringing clash of steel and flipping it right out of Solveig’s grip, which was easy, because he was tumbling to the floor, carried forward by his momentum but falling all the same. Deimos caught the sword by the hilt as it spun in the air and Solveig fetched up against Batuuli’s body with his arms bent at awkward angles under him and Lan just sat there, frozen.

‘Now they’ll start applauding,’ she thought, staring numbly out at the dead court, but that didn’t happen. Then she thought she must still be sleeping, and all these disjointed scenes—Azrael sitting with her in the library, Lan punching him, Batuuli tearing her bodice open and Tehya falling into her tureen, the sword flying up and Deimos catching it—these were all just moments from different dreams, pieced together in her first moments after waking before she forgot them altogether. In a moment, she would open her eyes and it would be morning and the servants would be bringing her breakfast tray and ignoring her when she asked if Azrael was all right.

Lan looked at him. He was not all right.

“Get out,” he said.

Chairs scraped back. Silverware clattered. Dishes broke. For a while, running feet and rustling gowns were deafening, but Azrael never looked up to watch the room empty. Only after the heavy doors shut for the last time did he move, rubbing beneath his mask and then removing it. He tossed it aside, too close to the table’s edge. The heavy horns jutted out over nothing; the mask teetered.

Lan picked it up before it could fall and put it down in a safer place.

“Go,” said Azrael. One hand remained over his eyes. The other strayed down to press over his stomach. “Just go.”

She should. She wanted to. She didn’t.

“Do you think you are safe with me?” His hand dropped, banging down on the table in a loose fist. He looked at her, too tired to be angry. He waved at the room, let his hand bang down again. “Safer than they? Get out!” He covered his eyes again. “Or stay. I don’t care what you do. You should not have come here tonight.”

“You brought me.”

“I should not have come here tonight.” Azrael’s claws dug into his brows, drawing tiny beads of black blood to drip down his face like tears. One by one, they fell into the grooves of his scars and disappeared into the hole in the side of his cheek. “Too soon…and too long overdue. Say something, if you’re going to stay. A small degree of defiance is of no use to anyone.”

“Is it my fault?”

“You?” He dropped his arm with a short laugh and looked at her. “What are you to her? What are you to me?”

“A trigger’s a small thing,” she replied, “but it fires the gun. I fought with you.”

“So?”

“You apologized.”

The hand now on the table drummed once. The one still cradling his stomach flexed. “So?”

“Have you ever apologized to her?”

The flames of his eyes flickered. He turned them out on the hall where his Children lay. His eyes rested longest on Batuuli.

“I’m not saying you had anything to apologize for,” she said uncomfortably. “Just that, from her view—”

“Thirty-one.”

Lan blinked.

He stared at the bodies for maybe half a minute more, then leaned back in his throne and picked up his cup again. He didn’t drink, just held it. “She asked how long it was before I saw the love die in her eyes. Thirty-one days. Even before the massacre, she had already begun to turn, but I thought…she would grow out of it.” He glanced over at Batuuli’s body. Blood had made a small pool around her head, like a dark halo. “I could have made her love me.”

“You can’t make someone—”

“Of course I can. My Revenants are made without the capacity to betray me, their loyalty and obedience assured without the inconvenience of earning it. My steward, my chamberlain, my cooks—all were raised to serve me with the most abject devotion, incapable of treachery. I could have brought her into this life with no other thoughts but mine. I could have put every word she ever spoke into her mouth. What are the dead to me but dolls? I can fill them with whatever stuffing I desire.”

Lan picked at the arm of her chair. The gold color was only paint and peeling. Beneath was just wood, greyish with age and a bit dry, as if it had spent too much time in storage. “Why didn’t you?”

“I could tell you I had heard enough of my own thoughts in the ages of my solitude and I suspect you would believe me, but the truth is, I knew no better. They were the first I had ever raised not to rot. All my concentration was taken in that endeavor, to stay corruption and ensure immortality equal to my own so that I would always…always have them. I did not realize until she was raised what I had done. Once made, my dead cannot be altered, only unmade, so I let her be. And I made them all in her image, so hers would not be the only mind among them. I knew it was a mistake.” He looked into his cup and gave it a brooding swirl. “But it was pleasant, for a time.”

“A mistake? Is that really how you thought of them?”

“I mean no offense. Many cherished children begin so.”

“Then why should they love you? Why should they even try? You gave up on them a long time ago.”

He grew perfectly, ominously still.

“How readily you speak those words,” he said after a while. The light in his eyes sparked brighter, but he did not look at her. “Long time. What is that to you? A year? Ten years?”

Too late, Lan bit her tongue. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I did not give up my Children’s love a long time ago,” he said, stabbing the words in like knives and twisting. “I gave that up almost in the same instant that I dared the attempt, but I did not have a long time to live with my mistake. No, child, that wound is still bleeding. A long time? A long time is what I spent in darkness, alone, convincing myself that if I had but one companion, I could endure the deathless hell of my existence! To see a face not my own! To hear another voice!”

“I’m sorry,” Lan said again. As bad a taste as it left in her mouth, she said it all: “For…your loss.”

“My loss? Mine?” He threw a laugh at her and banged his cup down. “I’ll not end my hungering dead for your empty platitudes. There is such a thing as being too diplomatic.”

Lan opened her mouth to argue and shut it again with a grimace. It was a stupid thing to say, even to the living. To him, it was obscene. But she couldn’t take it back, even in her own mind. She was sorry. She really was.

She picked at the arm of her chair, prying up flakes of gold paint and reminding herself with each splinter flicked away of the things he’d done—to her, to Norwood, to the whole world. “At least you can grieve for them.”

There was no answer, not one she could hear anyway, and she refused to look up. She watched her fingers chip away at the arm of the chair, exposing more and more of the ugly wood beneath. “You realize, don’t you, that you’re probably the only one in the world who can? You can be alone with them, say all those things you forgot to tell them and not have other people listening or laughing at how corny it sounds or just sighing because you’re taking so long. You can clean them up instead of chop them up. You can hold their hands because they’ll never grab you. You can kiss them one last time and never think even once how close that brings you to their teeth. You can grieve…and you don’t.”

“I gave them all they wanted from me. I gave them death.” He rubbed once more at his lidless eyes, then took up his mask and stood, calling for his steward.

After a noticeable pause, the dining hall doors opened and a dead man entered. There was no sign of apprehension on his pretty face, but he bowed quite a bit lower and longer than usual. “My lord.”

“Have this—” Azrael walked to the edge of the dais and gestured vaguely at the tables. “—packed and call in Deimos.”

“Yes, my lord.” The dead man gestured to someone out of the sight in the hall. “And…your Children?”

Azrael had already turned away. Only Lan saw the shadow of pain that tightened his muscles and dimmed his eyes. And he knew it had been seen. She could actually see him considering killing her for it, as clearly as if he were painting pictures in the air, but then his gaze fell to Solveig, lying at the foot of the dais steps. His voice, when he spoke, was no louder than a breath. “What do I do for them?”

“Why…” Lan shifted uncomfortably closer and lowered her own voice to a whisper. “Why are you asking me?”

“I don’t know what to tell him.” He raised his eyes, with effort, to search hers. “I don’t know how…How do you tend the dead? How do you honor them?”

Lan could feel that same stupid flutter of sympathy crawling up her throat. This time, she swallowed it. “Ours turn into Eaters,” she reminded him. “We break their backs and burn them.”

He turned his head and stayed that way, motionless, long after any sense of victory at seeing it had died. “Make whatever arrangements you deem appropriate,” he said finally.

“Yes, my lord.” The steward glanced behind him into the hall. “Deimos, my lord.”

Azrael beckoned, but did not turn, staring instead at Lan while the Revenant captain marched toward them. It was quiet enough, empty enough, that his boots made echoes and when those echoes stopped, Azrael said, “I require you to take a delivery of food to Norwood.”

The Revenant showed no surprise. “At once, my lord.”

“I trust it is more than Norwood requires or, indeed, can easily store,” Azrael went on, still staring down at Lan, “but whether they send the excess to other villages or sell it for profit or let it rot in the mud, I leave to their own judgment. I suspect they would rather waste what they cannot themselves consume. Humans, by their nature, do not readily extend sympathy to the suffering of others.”

“That’s funny, coming from you.”

“Is it? I don’t seem to understand humor well. I do, however, understand suffering. And sympathize. So if it is accepted,” Azrael continued, “such a delivery shall be made following the nightly feast, say, on each full moon.”

Lan had only been waiting for him to stop talking so she could answer his use of the words ‘suffering’ and ‘sympathy’, but this unexpected offer killed her argument unborn. She stepped back, uncertain.

He stepped forward, taking up that distance and more. “If it is accepted,” he repeated, with a distinct emphasis on the first word. He waited until he saw that Lan had heard it, then swung around to face his Revenant captain. “If it is not, if they choose instead to refuse my generous gift, if they fire upon the hands that extend it—”

“Wait,” said Lan.

“You are to break the walls of Norwood.”

“You can’t do that! The Eaters—”

“Shatter their greenhouses. Burn every building. Let nothing stand but the stones of their foundations.”

Deimos nodded once. “And the people, my lord?”

“No!” Lan leapt up, darting around the table to catch at his arm. “I’m sorry! Please! Kill me if you have to, but leave them alone!”

“Shall I show compassion?” he asked, staring coldly down at her as she clung to him.

“Yes! Please!”

“Whose? Mine or yours?”

Lan could only look at him, knowing she was powerless, knowing he knew it too.

He waited.

“Mine,” she whispered. “Mine, but—”

“So be it. Captain.”

“Yes, lord?”

“When you kill them, you will break their backs and burn them. You see? I can be merciful. And I expect you to be grateful for it when next we meet.” Azrael shook her off and seized her by the neck of her gown in the same motion, hurling her off the dais into the Revenant’s ready hands. “Get her out of my sight.”

“Yes, lord.” Deimos turned, dragging Lan with him as he marched swiftly away.

“Please, don’t do this!” Lan cried, stumbling as she fought against the Revenant’s grip, to no avail. “Azrael! Damn it, I said I was sorry!”

He did not answer. He kept his broad back to her and stood, motionless and unfeeling as a statue. She thought he might have turned his head slightly when the first of her noisy sobs shook out of her, but if so, it was only slightly. Then she was out, being passed into the hands of Azrael’s steward with all the care and consideration that might be shown to a bag of potatoes.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” the steward asked, pinching Lan’s sleeves between the extreme tips of his fingers so as to touch her as little as possible.

Deimos glanced back at the doors to the dining hall, his brows slightly furrowed. “He spoke of wanting her grateful at their next meeting. You would know better than I what to do with her until then.”

“I never want to see him again!” Lan wept.

They ignored her.

“All right.” The steward passed her off to a pikeman. “To our lord’s chambers.”

“I won’t go!”

The steward signaled a second pikeman. Between them, they picked her up as she struggled and simply carried her away.

* * *

They had changed the bedding in Azrael’s room from black and gold to grey and silver, which, with the cushions covered over and the room mostly in shadows, gave the whole thing the appearance of stone. Not a bed at all, but an altar. A place of sacrifice. How fitting that the chains she’d last worn should still be here.

Lan locked herself angrily into them and sat down to wait.

Hours passed without any way to count them. The fire had no fuel, but burned no lower. The only sound was the fountain spilling endlessly into Azrael’s bath. Her only companions were his sightless, staring masks.

Gradually, her thoughts shifted from Have they left yet? to Where are they now? Just how far was it from Haven to Norwood? She’d never spent more than an hour or so in any one ferry, in part because the ferrymen tended to keep regular rounds from which they were unwilling to deviate for one fare, but also because the ferries themselves just couldn’t hold that much of a charge. If the batteries went dry outside the walls, even one mile might as well be a thousand. But the Revenants had better vehicles and no reason to fear the Eaters. They had done in one day and one night the same distance that had taken Lan two months. Could they be there again already? How were they met?

Was everyone she knew dead?

The more she tried not to think of that, the more those thoughts ate their way in. Anger distracted her for a while, but couldn’t last. Fear followed, erosive, opening up a wider, blacker emptiness inside her that filled slowly up with guilt. Eventually, even that was gone and she was left not thinking, not even really feeling anymore, but only waiting.

Finally, he came.

She heard the door open, heard him say, “What—?” and then there was nothing for some time, only the weight of his stare. At last, the heavy door closed. His footsteps approached, aimed nowhere but at her. Lan tensed, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her.

He sat on the foot of the bed right behind her. She could feel the chill from his body, see the grey blur of him at the edge of her perceptions. When he took his mask off and set it on the bed beside him, one of its horns caught in her hair. He unhooked it, stroked her hair once, then clasped his hands and leaned forward over his thighs. He did not speak.

All the time he’d been gone, she had imagined this moment, when she could be defiant in chains at his feet. Now he was here. She had no strength, no courage, only Norwood.

“I am sorry,” Lan said. “If that makes any difference. I’m…so sorry. Please, I’ll do anything—”

“I have no way to call them back.”

“Then they’re all dead.”

They sat together, silent.

“They may choose not to provoke my Revenants,” he said at last. “They know they are unmatched.”

“I know we’re unmatched. I still provoked you.” Lan rubbed her dry eyes. Her chains rattled. “Haven’t you learned by now how stupidly self-destructive human nature really is?”

Azrael’s hand gripped her shoulder and gently squeezed. “I have learned it is unpredictable.”

“That’s not very comforting.”

There was a short, yet profound pause and then he said, “Are you…Do you want me to comfort you?”

Did she? She had never felt less like laughing in her life, but she did, and it truly felt funny. The tears that immediately followed were just as unstoppable and just as honest.

Azrael heaved a sigh that stirred her hair. Then he slipped his hands beneath her arms and pulled her up to sit on the bed beside him. Her chains weren’t quite long enough to allow that, so she ended up bent double, sobbing hard with her hands stuck out while he fetched the key from its hook on the wall and unlocked her shackles. Freed, she fell back and rolled onto her side, drawing her knees up to her chest, and just let the tears come.

She saw their faces—Danae and her children, snotty little Abbey and serious Ivy, who slept on the other side of the curtain next to Lan and her mother; Mother Muggs, who kept a hawk’s eye on all the goings-on of the Women’s Lodge and whose pinching fingers traveled freely through everyone’s pockets when no one was there to see; the Goode twins, Pippa and Posey, who had bought Lan’s share of the orchard for a pair of worn-out boots and a patched rucksack; Sheriff Neville and the louts who served under him, keeping order with batons and bare knuckles; Mayor Fairchild and his prune-faced wife and their brood of soft-handed children, Quillan and Henry and Sora and Eithon—oh, Eithon—none of whom ever set foot in a greenhouse unless it was to mock those working there. She was close to none of them, but she knew them all, every man and woman, every elder and every child, and knowing that dawn might find them all in an ash-pile while Eaters wandered through the broken glass and burnt wood of their ruined village made it easy to forget all the bad feelings and remember simply that they were human and how precious and rare life was.

If it ended tonight in Norwood, it would be her fault.

She hadn’t been able to stop the tears when they started. She couldn’t call them back when they dried up, even though her misery still sat like a stone in her chest, undiminished. She stared into the wall, her heart breaking into smaller and sharper pieces with every beat, and thought of herself in this very room, saying, ‘There never was an Eater turned back by tears.’

“I wish I’d never come here,” she said.

Azrael, waiting out her useless hysterics over by the fire, did not reply.

“I want to go home.” She curled up tighter, burying her face against her knees. “Let me go.”

“Why?”

“I should die with the rest of them.”

“Why?” he asked again, this time with the faintest hint of irritation. “How would that help?”

“It doesn’t.” She laughed once, bitterly. “I can’t do anything to help them. No matter how hard I try.”

“Self-pity is not attractive.”

“So? I’ll never be one of the beautiful dead.” Thoughts of Norwood rose like bubbles in mud, slow to surface, bringing with them the stink of deeper decay. She had always known this would end in failure. Now she would have to return to tumbled walls, to the dead staggering restlessly through blood and mud and broken glass. No one would be there to burn her when they took her down. No one would break her back to stop her from getting up again. “Let me go,” she said again. “You said you would. You said you’d send me anywhere I wanted.”

“You will recall I am a tyrant.”

She thought of Norwood. Pippa and Posey would have turned the rows as soon as Lan left, planting their own good barley and selling Lan’s marrow plants and next season’s bean seed to those who could afford no better. The trees which had been the source of such grim pride to Lan’s mother would be fruiting, assuming they hadn’t already been picked clean to supply Azrael’s first demand. In the alehouse, they would be making yeast cakes and drying hops in preparation for brewing the beer that would keep the mayor richer than everyone else for another year. The late-season lambs would be weaned and their mothers ready for fresh breeding; the yearlings slaughtered at Yule would soon be coming out of the smokehouse to make room for the hogs that would go under the hammer at Beltane. These were the rhythms of Norwood’s simple song: sow and reap, work and sleep, birth and death. Every day like the day before, building a year that would pass the same as every other.

Azrael’s rough hand brushed at her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him approach.

“Please end the Eaters.” Lan rolled over, catching at his arm before he could withdraw. “Just for tonight. Please. If they have to die, let them die, but please don’t make them come back!”

“Deimos has his orders. He will fulfill them.”

“Yeah, he’ll break their backs so they can’t move, but they’ll still come back! He’ll burn them, but he’ll burn them alive!”

“Not alive.”

“They scream, Azrael! Eaters scream! Don’t tell me they can’t feel it!”

He clenched his jaw and looked away.

“There are children in Norwood! There are babies! Have you ever seen an infant Eater? Have you ever heard the…the sound they make?”

She could see his pulse ticking in the black vein exposed at his opened throat. Otherwise, he did not move.

“Please.” Lan pulled his unresisting hand close and curled around it, pressing her brow to his cold, cracked flesh. “One day. Just in Norwood. No one has to know!”

“No.”

“Let them die,” said Lan, “or let me die with them.”

“No!” His hand wrenched free of hers. “Hate me, if it makes the grief easier to bear, but I will not unmake my victory for you. The people of your village must suffer the fate they forge by their actions.” He stood glaring down at her a moment, then seized his belt and battled it open. “As you did, when you came here and when you gave yourself to me.”

She rolled over in his bed, staring at the wall without seeing it as he undressed. Her eyes ached, but stayed dry. Her chest hurt, but she kept breathing just fine. She could feel the mattress shift as he climbed onto it, but it might as well be happening to someone else, in a story she had once been told and half-forgotten.

“This is the fate you have chosen,” he told her, trailing the backs of his fingers down her thigh. When he found the hem of her dress, he turned his hand and drew it back up, fabric bunching around his wrist. His palm made a rasping sound against her skin, unpleasant to hear, but not to feel. “So embrace it. The past is dead.”

“So is Norwood,” she whispered.

“Perhaps. But even if so, grief cannot bring it back to life. Leave it behind.” He slipped his hand beneath the folds of her dress and cupped her breast. “Be with me.”

With him? With the man, the monster, who had sent the Revenants to Norwood, who had raised them in the first place? He was Death. He was the Devil. So why wasn’t she fighting? Why not scream, kick, spit in his horrible face? She let him touch her, caress her, and if she shuddered when he did it, it was only because she wanted it so much. Why did she want this?

Nothing had changed. Norwood may still be burning and all that she had may be lost, but all that was in the world outside. Here, if only in this room, this bed, she thought she could let it go. It would be all the heavier when she had to pick it up again, but she could let it go for now.

Lan rolled over and put her arms around him.

He stiffened, then shook his head hard and hissed, “Stop it! Your past lovers may have found a pretense of desire endearing, but I do not. I will not be mocked in my own bed!”

“W-What?”

“Close your eyes,” he ordered, roughly gripping her thigh and maneuvering himself atop her. “Say nothing. I’ll take what I want, I need no help from you.”

Now it was Lan who said, “Stop it,” and although she said it without his vehemence, he recoiled. “You’ve been poisoned and you lost your Children tonight. You’re hurting every way you can be hurt. The last thing you want is sex.”

He flinched again, then bared his teeth at her, his lip splitting wide to show the gleam of bone beneath. “What is it you imagine I want?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…you want what I want. To feel…better. Maybe you want me.” She pulled tentatively at his neck, but he would not be moved. “Maybe…I want you too.”

A moment’s silence, like a slamming door, while he let those words wither. Then he pried her hands off him and said, “Get out.”

“Azrael—”

“I have no use for liars. I am done with you. Out.”

She fumbled at the loosened draping of her dress, trying to shield herself from his contempt. “It’s not a lie!”

“Of course it is!” he snapped. “Did you really think I would not know it? The sweetest words are still belied by the flesh.” Suddenly, he was on her, his weight crushing down over the whole of her body and his hand knotted in her hair. “Speak whatever words you will,” he growled. “I hear the pounding of your heart. I smell the fear in your sweat. I feel—” His knee thrust itself between hers, wedging her thighs apart. She slapped at him with a high cry of panic and he smiled. “—your true touch.”

“You’re hurting me!”

He relaxed his hold on her hair, but did not release her. His knee ground against her pubis, miming the rhythm of sex while he watched. Her thighs clenched, her hands gripped the bedding, her belly tightened; he shared it all.

“You think because you do not scream or struggle that I am blind to your horror, but you cannot deceive me. Your skin—” He passed a hand down the curve of her arched throat, light as a whisper. “—crawls. You writhe. You shudder.” He squeezed her breast, his thumb scraping back and forth across her nipple before bending deliberately as if to take it into his mouth. He stopped, head cocked, to listen to the involuntary sound this act provoked with a smile of bitter satisfaction. “You moan.”

She lay aching under him, her body alive to everything, and felt like crying. “You made me feel good before,” she whispered, unable to meet his burning stare. “I want that again. I don’t want to think tonight. I just want you…to make me not feel like…me.”

He spat out an unknown word that needed no translation and shoved himself away from her. Lan lunged after him, catching him with a shaking hand he could have easily thrown off. Instead, he stopped, crouching like a gargoyle at the very edge of the bed and, like a gargoyle’s, the body she embraced might as well have been stone. He offered no encouragement as she twined her arms around his chest. The points of his exposed spine caught at the flimsy fabric of her hanging dress; she tore it off with shaking hands and pressed close, feeling bare bone against her bare breasts.

The water of the fountain endlessly fell into his bath. There was no other sound.

At long last, he said, simply and without inflection, “I cannot believe what you say.”

“Then I won’t talk.”

He looked at her. Before he could turn away, she caught him and kissed his scarred mouth. He tried to pull away, but his efforts to break her grip came to his hand on her wrist and no more. When she pulled at him, he allowed her to lay him down.

As she tried to kiss him again, he turned his face away. Undaunted, she brushed her lips instead across his split cheek, following the edges of the open wound down his throat until it closed. She kissed the bullet holes on his chest, kissed the dry bone exposed at his rib, kissed the ancient runnels carved into his stomach. Her hand moved lower still, finding the heat of his jutting cock and gently squeezing as he groaned.

“Your mouth,” he ordered.

She raised her head and looked at him.

His own mouth twitched. “Please,” he amended.

She obediently shifted, kissing a steady if unhurried path around his shaft while she stroked him in her fist. Next, her tongue, traveling every inch, now wetting him in long slow passes, now tracing loops and knots with just the point of her tongue. At last, Lan fastened her lips at the underside of his base, lightly sucking all the way to the tip as his back arched, then taking him into her mouth as fully as she could.

Azrael’s hand came to rest on her head, his claws pricking at her scalp in time with her movements. “Ah…how can the mouth that speaks such honeyed poison give such pleasure?”

She had said she wouldn’t speak, so she hummed.

His hips bucked up at her and he panted out a short laugh. “You have your own cruelty, human, for all that you revile mine.”

Kicking away the last clinging swath of her dress, Lan rose up and clumsily straddled him. She could feel his cock like a brand against her belly. She closed her eyes, shutting out every sense but that of touch as she took it into her hand and then into her body.

It wasn’t sex, not the way she knew it—the tarnished coin by which so many necessities were secured in this world. Sex was furtive; there was no privacy within the village walls and outside them, the slightest disturbance brought Eaters. Sex was mechanical; she did only what she had to do to satisfy the terms of the bargain, which more often than not was just to stand up against the wall and keep watch. Not now. Not with him.

Her first movements were self-conscious, unsure of what he wanted or was feeling, but she knew what she wanted and in the absence of command, she took it. What began with caution soon gave way to something violent, that was nearly an attack. She rode him, graceless, bucking and clawing at his chest for leverage, her eyes squeezed shut against the distraction of sight. His body was awful, but it gave her what she wanted and hers took it in with single-minded, animal need.

She could feel it starting to happen already, that little taste of death. It was fire and shadow wrapped together, growing both brighter and blacker as she chased it. Anticipation coiled inside her, winding her up tighter and tighter, until she was only huddled over him, shivering in the heat of the thing’s grip, scarcely moving at all and falling further and further away from the finish.

And then he began to move with her, rising up to meet the stuttering roll of her hips with a powerful thrust of his own. At once, the darklight promise of the thing erupted. She arched, eyes rolling back and one arm clutching at empty air, just like the brewer’s boy having a fit, and before those first waves had receded, she was spinning.

Suddenly, the bed was at her back and Azrael was above her and he was right about everything. Her skin crawled; her senses heightened until each bead of sweat was a razor and even the air had a weight she could feel. She writhed; her legs wrapped his hips, her hands clawed his shoulders, her head tossed until her sweat-damp hair slapped the bed and stung her face. She moaned; the more she tried to lock them inside, the louder they got, until the second eruption took her, when she screamed. Lights burst behind her eyes and turned black, so that for a moment, she thought surely she was fainting and the tiny part of her that still cared about anything was embarrassed.

But her vision cleared and there was Azrael, neck arched, groaning in the grip of his own darklight, coming as close to death as he ever could. She felt that too, a bloom of heat intense enough to hurt, if only for that first second. When it was over, he slumped, breathing hard against her shoulder before pushing himself off and dropping onto his back. The bed shuddered. So did Lan, one hand clutching between her legs as if to ease the ache of his withdrawal.

Neither spoke for some time.

Finally, he said, “You are…so different.”

Her brows knit. She glanced at him uncertainly.

He caught it and laughed, wiping her sweat from his skin. “No, it was not a compliment, although someday you will have to learn how to accept them. Chamberlain!”

Lan fumbled at the blankets, just managing to cover herself as the door opened and Azrael’s manservant entered.

“My guest requires fresh attire,” said Azrael, rising unabashedly from the bed and gesturing back at her. “And an escort to her room.”

“Yes, lord.” The dead man went immediately to the wardrobe. Apparently, Azrael ripping the clothes off his concubines was not a singular occurrence.

Lan didn’t watch to see what he picked out for her. “What…What did I do wrong?”

Azrael looked up from his inspection of the scratches on his shoulder in surprise. “Nothing, but the hour is late.”

“That’s not…” Lan looked uncomfortably toward the waiting, stone-faced chamberlain—the dress was blue—and tugged her blanket up a little higher. “You don’t have to send me away.”

“And you don’t have to prove your conviction.” He paused, then forced a smile and a gentler tone as he said, “Surely tomorrow is soon enough for your audience.”

Lan dropped her eyes and nodded, but didn’t move.

The water in the fountain poured endlessly down.

“Leave us,” said Azrael.

Lan looked up, but it was his chamberlain who obeyed, laying the dress by the wardrobe and discretely retreating. Azrael stood, his arms folded, until the heavy door shut, then said, “No woman has ever asked to sleep in my bed before. Is it a trick? You have my favor yet, but I warn you—”

“It’s just a long night.” She dragged a hand through her hair, pushing it back only to pull it forward again, like it was a curtain she could close against his suspicion. “There’s nothing up in that room…but Norwood. Please. I can’t be alone with that tonight. I can’t be alone with them.”

“But you can be alone with me? That’s bold of you.” He took one step toward her, still smiling, sketching out a one-armed gesture that was nearly a bow. “Am I not the monster who murdered them?”

“I know, all right? I know.” Lan slapped a hand over her eyes, which had begun to blur ominously although they were, for the moment, still dry. “I can forget that for one night. I can pretend I’m not me when I’m with you. I can pretend you’re not you…when you’re with me.”

“I envy you.” He paced over to the fire and did something that lowered the flames, then went to the bath and shut off the water. Time crashed down into the room, measured out one drop at a time, with longer and longer spaces between, until it stretched out forever. “If you stay,” he said at last, stressing the first word, “you will…pretend…you want to stay.”

“I…” do. Lan rubbed her eyes again. Still dry. “I will.”

“You will not speak of the dead without the walls of Haven.” With the fire down and his back turned, all she had of him was the splash of eyelight reflecting off wet stone—a faint pale smudge—and his voice. “Nor of the living.”

“I won’t speak at all, if that’s what you want.”

His eyes found her through the screen that separated his bath from the rest of the room, their eerie light flicking in and out with every step. At one point, he dragged his claws along the latticework—she could hear the tk-k-k-tk sound—but his eyes were all she could see of him. They seemed to float, disembodied, like his voice, when he said, “And what would you say, if I allowed you to speak?”

She let the blanket fall, a little at a time, and held out one arm. “Come to bed.”

He made a sound deep in his throat, not a laugh or a mutter, but some rough animal sound. The mattress shifted, bucking her slightly toward him as his eyes swooped suddenly close. Before she could leap away (and she would have, damn her for a coward), his hand found her in the dark, stroking her cheek briefly before slipping around to the back of her neck. “You’ve never said those words before, have you?” he murmured, laying her down. “Say you haven’t.”

“I haven’t,” she admitted.

His hand moved, brushing along her neck and continuing down until it encountered the edge of the blanket, then up again to cup her breast. His face loomed over her, impossible to escape, but he made it easy to avoid his gaze. His attention was fixed lower, caressing as much with his eyes as with his hands, and Lan soon found herself transfixed as well. She’d had sex before, been fondled, leered at, and it didn’t bother her, but this was different. She was never so aware of her body as when Azrael touched it.

“You’ve never slept with another man before,” he said, close against her skin. “Have you?”

“I…” She roused as if from sleep, blinking too fast and weirdly breathless. “You know I…have. You know…This isn’t fair! You said you don’t want me to lie!”

“Is it a lie?”

“I…I’ve been with—”

“Been with. But not slept with. Slept beside.”

It was true, although it was not something she’d ever thought of before. The revelation was not a pleasant one. But he’d told her, hadn’t he? ‘You think you have no more innocence to lose,’ he’d said, ‘but you are wrong.’ She’d just sold it in pieces, like everything else. And some of the pieces, it seemed, were small enough to slip her notice.

“W-will you…” Her voice, none too strong, broke to a whisper. “Will you sleep with me?”

He shook his head, his eyes leaving faint tracers as they moved side to side. “Alas, I do not often sleep, nor easily tire. But if you ask me…nicely…I will hold a watch while you sleep.”

“Not yet.”

“No.” Giving her breast a final gentle squeeze, he dropped his hand once more to the blanket and pulled it away. She felt the chill of the room only for an instant before his flesh, even colder, covered her. “Not yet.”

CHAPTER NINE

She dreamed of Norwood, but not the usual dreams. Just what made her think so, Lan could not guess, since she didn’t remember her dreams as a rule and didn’t really remember this one either. All she had were impressions, like the stink of char that lingers long after the fire or a print in the mud after the boot has marched on. So she knew she had been in Norwood and she knew it had been empty, although the only image that stayed with her was that of the long table in the cooklodge, long abandoned, with a half-empty jar of peaches and an old weathered rucksack at one end. There were no bodies, no smoke, no blood. Only the silence, broken by a sudden explosion of sound that ripped her right out of sleep.

She did not immediately know where she was. The noise that had awakened her had become the crash of falling water, a sound her brain stubbornly tried to insist was the waterwheel at the village mill, even though she could clearly see indoor-walls hung with bedcurtains and smell the indoor-smell of sweaty sex in a windowless room. She was lying sideways at the foot of a bed. There were claw marks on the headboard and tears in the sheets. Lan had been half-wrapped in a blanket and left in defeat, discarded on the field of battle. The victor had long since left and she knew she was alone, so when she raised her head and saw a dark figure in a white, flowing gown coming at her, she very naturally let out a caw of alarm and threw herself back in a mad scramble that propelled her out into empty space and then to the floor, where she knocked her head hard on the tiles.

Eater, was her only thought and now that her legs were hopelessly tangled and anchored somewhere to the bed, she would be caught, torn, devoured…and raised up.

The figure did not slow, but did affect a curt sigh. Then it knelt to unwrap Lan’s kicking legs, slapping her once to stop her struggles. It was the slap that brought recognition.

“Serafina?” Lan scooted back, trying to cover as much of herself as she could with one arm. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“My lord has appointed me your handmaiden,” the dead woman said, although she didn’t sound very happy about it. She began to strip the bed, moving with brisk motions and touching the materials she took away as little as possible.

“I don’t want a servant,” said Lan, still more asleep than awake and so baffled by this unexpected ‘gift’ that her emotions bordered on horror.

“I am not your servant. I am his. I am merely your handmaiden.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I prepare you at his command. But you are not my mistress.” Serafina threw her a black and blameful stare over one round shoulder. “My mistress is dead. Begin your bath. I will be with you presently.”

Bath? The last cobweb cleared. She looked and saw, instead of the waterwheel she had known deep down would not be there, the intricate screen that concealed Azrael’s bath, with the topmost curves of the lion-headed fountain visible over the top. Now and then, rebel droplets found a way to splash up on the wall, catching firelight that slowly faded as the wet spots dried.

“Are you still sitting there?” Serafina straightened up with an armload of linens and a menacing look in her eye. “Our lord has summoned you and you will not embarrass him with this…this unseemly…” Words failed her. Pursing her lips, she threw down her linens and came around the bed. “Clean yourself,” she said, hauling Lan to her feet and giving her a shove toward the bath. “You stink of your trade.”

The insult almost hit. She could feel the wind of its wake, but other things were more important now.

“Summoned me?” she said. “Are the Revenants back?”

“My lord said you would ask and that I should answer.” The words were civil enough, but just the fact that she spoke them managed to convey her disapproval for the question. “They have just passed Haven’s gate and will soon be at the palace.”

Lan grabbed at a blanket and ran for the door.

The dead do move fast and the handmaiden had her before she was halfway there. Lan tried and failed to break her grip and was subsequently dragged back across the bedroom in spite of her struggles, stripped of her cover and bodily flung into the water.

She came up thrashing and sputtering, then slapped a palmful of water directly up into Serafina’s impassive face. “I don’t want a bath! Get out of my way!”

The handmaiden did not even wipe at her face, only glowered down at her and dripped. “There is soap there beside you.”

Lan waded toward the stairs. Serafina moved to block them.

“I said, I don’t want a bloody bath!”

“I do not care what you say, warmblood. I don’t care what you want. I do my lord’s will.” Serafina looked her over and shook her head, her perfectly-painted lip curling with unfeigned disgust. She headed for the wardrobe. “Use the soap.”

She couldn’t fight and time was wasting. The drive from Haven’s gate to the palace was not a long one. Swearing, Lan sloshed over and grabbed the soap. She looked clean enough to her eyes, but she supposed she did need it, if only to get her blood moving. In addition to some understandable soreness, her entire body felt stiff and too heavy. Just tired, she thought. It had been a long night, if the night was even over.

“What time is it?” Lan called.

“Not yet seven.”

“Seven what?” Lan asked impatiently. “Is it morning? Half-noon? High-noon? What?”

Serafina came over to the screen to make certain Lan could hear her loud sigh of annoyance and then moved away again. “Morning.”

“How long has Azrael been up?” Lan asked next, trying to guess how long she’d been sleeping.

“I’m sure I would not know!”

“No, of course you wouldn’t. Bloody useless, you are.” Lan climbed out of the bath and past her sniffing handmaiden to dry herself by the fire. Bending over to wring out her hair, she caught sight of some bruises on her thigh…and her arm…and her ass. And far from upsetting her, she found herself actually smiling. Like she was proud of them. When she looked up, Serafina was there in front of her, looking at them too. Her lips were pursed again.

“You should see the other guy,” said Lan and went back to drying her hair.

The dress Serafina deemed worthy was high-waisted and low-cut, with a skirt that was both too tight and too long. She couldn’t run in it, and in fact could barely walk in it, since Serafina slapped her hand every time she tried to pick up her stupid skirt. It was also pink. Not sunrise-pink or ripe-peach pink, but some lackluster greyish pink Lan had never seen in nature, like a moldy rose. She had plenty of time to hate it, mincing all the way from Azrael’s chamber to the dining hall and tripping over the damn hem every few steps, especially on the stairs.

At the doors to the dining hall, Serafina made her stop to give her some final primping, a process her new handmaiden did not conclude as much as abandon in despair. As Azrael’s steward went in to announce her, Lan received a final adjustment to her bosom and two quick slaps “for color” before Serafina retreated.

“You aren’t coming in with me?” Lan asked.

“My orders are to prepare you, not to wait on you,” Serafina added with a toss of her braids. “I will do no more than I am ordered. You are not my mistress.”

And with that, she stalked off, but Azrael’s steward was already glaring at her, since it seemed she’d missed her cue to enter, so there was no time to think of scathing things she might have said. She went in.

The breakfast meal was still being laid out. Pots of tea and coffee were all that she initially saw, but even as she walked, servants appeared with platters of morning cakes and sweetrolls, sausages and ham, fried tomatoes and mushrooms and stewed prunes. Seeing it, smelling it, reminded Lan that she hadn’t had anything apart from tea yesterday, and reminded her so well that she forgot her stupidly tight skirt and tripped on the dais stairs, banging her knee and scraping both wrists in an effort to catch herself.

No one laughed, which meant that her voice rang out like a brass bell when she shouted, “Oh, you fucking thing!” Seizing it by its smirking hem, she ripped it right up the seam as far as her thigh, eliciting quite a few gasps from the crowd, especially considering none of them had to breathe. None of them had to wear this skirt either, she reasoned, and if it shocked them to see her flash some skin as she climbed the stairs, that was their malfunction.

Azrael pretended to be utterly absorbed in the buttering of a heel of brown bread, but as she limped up the stairs, he said mildly, “I like it better that way.”

“I bet you do. Where are they?”

“In the garrison, I should imagine. Deimos will be here shortly. I left orders he was to wash before making his report.”

“You did what?” Lan shot a hot, embarrassed glance out into the hall, counting all the heads that had turned, and made an effort to at least try and sound like she was joking when she said, “And then what? A little nap, a light tea?”

“Would you rather have seen the blood?”

She looked away, at the floor in front of the dais steps where Deimos would have stood. The tiles were polished to such a high shine that they already appeared to be wet. “Is there blood?” she asked, not quite as evenly as he.

“I don’t know.” He waved a hand at the empty chair beside his throne without looking at it or her. “But I thought it wise to anticipate. Sit with me. Eat, if you can.”

If she could? Of course she could. She was hungry. Even now, as much as she wanted to keep staring at that not-wet, not-bloody spot at the foot of the dais, her eyes were straying to the tables where the dead court pretended to eat. And it was only as she was doing that and silently berating herself for daring to be hungry when all of Norwood was maybe burnt and maybe not, that she noticed something she probably ought to have seen from the moment she walked in the room.

The twin rows of tables that lined the long hall were filled with dead people, just as they had been the night before. In fact, they were so unremarkably the same people, dressed in the same finery and laughing the same laughs, that her eye had gone right over them without considering at all how really odd that was…the morning after a death. Now that she was looking, she even recognized some of Batuuli’s and Solveig’s courtiers in their usual places. Beyond them, the normally empty chairs that had surrounded Tehya were now filled with strangers. Only the imperial thrones had been removed, so that the tables where his Children once sat were now no different from any other in this end of the hall.

His Children were not mourned. They weren’t even missed. It was as if they had never existed at all.

“Must we do this every morning?” Azrael asked in a hard voice. “Whose wounds will you close with hunger? Whose suffering will you end? Sit, I say.”

She did, but could not seem to stop staring out there and really, what was she looking for? Black veils and remembrance candles? What did the dead know of mourning? For that matter, what did she? In Norwood, grief was for young mothers and the silly girls who loved reckless boys. Funerals were fires where folk lined up with empty pails because the ash was so good at repelling slugs and snails. If the departed was someone important, there might be a word or two said the next time the village gathered, but more often, it was to argue over debts.

Lan’s mother had died owing Mother Muggs five ‘slip for a winter blanket, the twins ten days labor for the seed in their two rows, and the sheriff…the sheriff and his rent…and that was grief in Norwood. Was that indifference any better than Haven’s?

Lan glanced at Azrael and found him gazing back at her with eyes that knew too well what she had been thinking.

“Yes?” he said coolly.

“What? Nothing. Good morning.” There were a few covered serving dishes close to her. Lan rattled through them until she found some hot oats and dipped herself out a bowlful to prove how undisturbed she was. What did a dolly talk about at the table the morning after her johnny killed his kids? “How are you?”

“What should I have done?” Azrael lifted a hand, managing nearly without any motion at all to indicate the entire room, maybe even the whole of Haven, and banged it down again. The sound made ripples of silence at the nearer tables. He raked his eyes across them and poured himself a large cup of tea. “What should I have done?” he asked again, quietly now. “I gave them no command. Lacking such, they can do only what they know to do.”

“This is fine,” Lan said, somewhat chagrined. “This is…just fine. Cheery.”

“Indeed. They burned my Children in my garden as if they were common offenders of my law. And then they made lemon cakes for breakfast.” Azrael took a slice and tossed it on her plate. “Here. In remembrance.”

Lan pinched off a corner and uncertainly ate it. It was the most impossibly delicious thing she’d ever had in her life and never mind how hideously inappropriate it was in the circumstance. Sweet and tart and light and moist. It tasted like angels kissing. Like angels fucking.

Azrael was watching her, his chin propped on one fist, idly stirring his tea to cool it. “Do you favor it?”

“Yes!” Lan said, sounding and probably looking more appalled than pleased. “Bugger me, that’s blinding!”

“Mm. I favor it myself. Which is why I am fairly certain it would have graced this morning’s table regardless of last night’s events.” He looked out over the room, his gaze lingering on each of his Children’s former tables in turn, before returning to his cup. “They have no memorial.”

“I’m…sure you could—”

“Of course I could. At a word, I could have monuments raised, processions through the streets, black horses and wreaths and the tolling of bells, but how can that honor them?” He took a small swallow of tea, grimaced, and set the cup aside. “They would not wish to be remembered as my Children.”

Lan frowned, watching his hand stray to his stomach.

“So that will be my memorial,” he was saying. “That I allow them to be forgotten.”

“Are you all right?”

“I do not grieve for them. As you say, I gave up even the hope of love long ago. But I do regret, although I find even I cannot say for certain whether I more regret their deaths or the lives I gave them.”

“No, that’s not—I mean, that’s something too,” she said lamely, “but I meant…are you all right?”

He glanced down at himself, probing at his stomach with one hand. His thumbclaw tapped along the rings that closed his freshest wound and made them jingle together merrily. “Some pain yet, but improved.”

“Are you sure?”

He cocked his head inquiringly, then looked down at his tea and uttered a wordless sound of understanding. With a crooked smile, he passed her the cup and watched as she took a cautious sip. “Gentian and licorice,” he explained as she choked and fought not to spit it right back into the cup. “It helps the pain and aids healing, but I…do not favor the taste. No matter. I endure. How do you find your handmaiden?”

“I found her, all right, but do I really have to keep her?” Lan took a huge bite of her lemon cake and let it wash her mouth clean. “I don’t need one.”

“My concubine will be attended.”

There was no argument in his tone, but she tried anyway. “I don’t think she likes me.”

“She was raised to serve another.” He took a swallow of tea, baring his teeth at it like a warning afterwards. “If she becomes tiresome, tell me. She is fit for no other work and I suspect if I gave her the choice, she would choose the oblivion I gave her sisters, but she volunteered herself at my request and I will hold her to it as long as I can.”

“You killed the other handmaidens?”

“It would have been cruel to put them to other work.”

“But you kept all of them?”

Azrael tracked her pointing finger out into the hall and studied Batuuli’s and Solveig’s courtiers. “I raised them to do nothing,” he said, watching them laugh and feast and fan themselves. “They are happy enough to continue doing it in my Children’s absence. The same cannot be said for my Children’s personal servants, so I showed them the only mercy I could.”

“But—”

“It is not their fault I raised them to be what they are,” Azrael said quietly. “It is not their fault I regret having done so.”

“So everyone gets what they deserve, huh?”

“In Haven.”

“I’m in Haven.” Lan tossed off a shrug, trying to pretend it was a joke. “What do I deserve?”

“Me.”

Well, she’d known it was stupid to ask. She caught the last crumbs of her cake and ate them, one by one, in silence.

He started to drink, sighed into his cup, then set his tea down and said, staring straight ahead into the hall, “This is not how I wish to begin my day.”

“Sorry.” And to put the full stop on that subject, Lan asked, “Is that black pudding?”

“Possibly.” He passed the tray to let her determine for herself. “Did you sleep well?”

“You were there. Did I?”

He took a curiously long time to answer. “You dreamed,” he said at last. “Tea?”

“Hell, no.”

“I have other teas,” he said dryly. “Or do you prefer coffee even at breakfast? I’ve noticed you remain rather American in many habits. Your mother’s influence, I suppose.”

“Influence, right.” Lan laughed through her last mouthful of cake and turned her attention, reluctantly, to her cooling bowl of cereal. “How could you tell I was dreaming?”

“That was rather a scornful laugh.”

She looked up from the job of drizzling honey on oats, then quickly down again, although she did not feel guilty and had no reason to. She was not blushing. It was just a little warm in here. “I loved my mother.”

“I don’t doubt it. She was a strong woman,” he said, passing the butter and cream as if by way of apology. “I imagine she had a strong influence on you.”

“Sure, if by ‘influence’ you mean she did everything but brand me with her bloody lost America.” Lan scooped out a savage lump of butter and stirred it in her bowl. It didn’t want to melt. She’d let the damn cereal get too cold. “She was mad on it. I loved her, but she was.”

“Mm.”

“She didn’t say much, you know. So it was hard, because sometimes it seemed like everything she did say was her correcting me. ‘It’s not rubbish, it’s trash.’ ‘It’s a sweater, not a jumper.’ ‘Don’t call it a bin.’ ‘That’s a flashlight.’ ‘I’m not your Mum.’” Lan broke it off there and came back with a strained smile. “So, yeah, coffee. Thanks. Could you tell what I was dreaming? I never remember them, myself.”

A servant twitched forward, but it was Azrael who poured. “I would not have thought your mother’s memory of her homeland to be sharp enough that she should nurture it so devotedly all the rest of her life. You say she came here as so young a child.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but she did. She said it was how she kept it alive. With words,” said Lan, rolling her eyes as she stirred sugar into her drink. “Hundreds of millions of people dead, and that was her whatchacallit. Her memorial. What did I dream?”

“I suppose it made her feel less alone. I don’t imagine she met many Americans, and fewer still as the years passed. Eventually, she must have wondered if she were the last.”

“Maybe. Why are you avoiding the question? Do I talk in my sleep or something?” she demanded, and leaned forward to teasingly whisper, “Did I say another man’s name?”

“You wept.”

Lan blinked, her smile fading. One hand rose toward her eyes, as if there would still be tears to wipe away, and hovered there.

The dining hall doors swept open at that awkward moment to admit Azrael’s steward, not alone. “Deimos, my lord.”

“Ah.” Azrael beckoned, cutting his eyes at Lan and shaking his head when she started to rise. “You have a report for me, captain?”

The Revenant marched up the broad aisle between the tables, his bootheels crisp as gunshots, to kneel before the dais. His uniform was spotless. His hair was neatly combed and very slightly damp. “My lord, as commanded, I have delivered your gift to Norwood.”

“What happened?” Lan blurted.

Azrael glanced at her, then at the Revenant. “And?”

“We were not met nor in any way confronted.” The Revenant made a gesture, as if he’d read about shrugs and wanted to try one. “Some of their youths made remarks.”

“Ah well. Remarks.” Azrael took his knife to Lan’s plate, cutting a small wedge of black pudding and sampling it. “Treasonous, one assumes?”

“Rude, certainly. Their elders pulled them back soon enough.”

“Sensible of them. What am I tasting?”

“Blood,” said Lan.

He set down his knife hard and looked coldly at her.

“Really. Hog’s blood.”

“Hm.” He turned back to the Revenant. “I do not dignify the boastful chatter of boys with my attention. But now tell me, how was my gift received?”

“With my men at a distance, lord. But it was received. Or at least, it was not immediately declared poison or burnt. We did not stay to watch them eat.”

“You mean you just left?” It was not relief Lan heard in her voice as she spoke, but doubt. “You didn’t do anything?”

Deimos glanced at her, then at Azrael, and finally faced her straight-on. “I do as my lord commands.”

Lan cut her hand through that like the words could be slapped away. “Yeah, whatever, but did you leave them alive?”

“Yes.”

She had so expected to hear a ‘no’ that her heart’s first act on hearing his answer was to cramp in grief, then start beating again, too fast and too hard. She sagged back in her chair, just staring at him. “All of them?” she said at last.

Again, Deimos looked to his lord for direction. Azrael gave none, only poured himself another cup of tea. The Revenant shifted on his knee, gripping at the hilt of his sword in a restless sort of way. “How am I to know who lived or died within their walls? I say we killed no one. We obeyed our lord’s orders and delivered his gift. It was received. We left.”

“Well done, Captain. You may stand.” As the Revenant took up a post to one side of the dais, Azrael leaned back in his throne and raised his teacup to Lan. “To human nature,” he said with a smile. “In all its unpredictable variations.”

Lan had an answer, but the sound of two hundred chairs scraping and two hundred people standing startled it right out of her head. “To human nature!” they all said and drank whatever they happened to have in their cups. Then they all sat down again.

It was several seconds before Lan realized her mouth was open. She closed it and looked at Azrael.

“It’s called a toast,” he said, rubbing the brows of his snarling mask.

“Why did they…?”

“They’re called sycophants.”

Lan stared back out at the hall, more confused than ever. The word was familiar, but the hazy image that accompanied it—that of her mother, showing her a picture in a book of some great, grey beast with its tail growing out of its face—had no obvious connection to anything in his dead court.

“No matter. Your former home is safe and has my promise of regular shipments of table scraps,” he continued, waving a servant over for a fresh pot of tea. “I imagine there will always be hunger from time to time, but with their prudence and my charity, it should be enough to keep the wolf of starvation forever from Norwood’s door.”

“Thank you.”

He glanced at her, a glance that became a sidelong, considering stare. His thumbclaw scraped back and forth across the rim of his teacup. “Now that your mind is at ease,” he said at last, in an oddly wary and reserved tone, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to return to the Red Room after our nightly audience.”

“Not if I have a choice.”

“Oh?” He looked out at the dining hall, at no one and nothing in particular. “Why is that?”

“There are a million stairs in that tower.”

“Ah.”

“I hit my knee when I fell,” she explained, twitching the now-split skirt aside to show him the forming bruise and also quite a bit of her thigh.

His gaze lingered there awhile and then he reached down and matched the fingers of his hand to some of last night’s bruises. “I was vigorous,” he remarked.

Lan raised his golden collar off his shoulder to expose the fresh scratches carved there. “So was I.”

“Yes. You seek comfort after the same fashion of a terrier seeking rats.” He fingered one of the scratches, smiling. “All the same, I shall be sorry to see the mood depart you. These little hurts are nothing measured against the delights you offer when properly inspired. And in that spirit—” He resettled his collar and took up his cup again. “—I have a proposition to put before you.”

“What’s that?”

“A suggestion or, as in this case, a contract, put forth for consideration and effected upon mutual agreement.”

“No, believe it or not, I knew that word. I mean, what are you offering?”

“The people of Norwood hunger and I have fed them. The people of other villages hunger—” He indicated the tables below. “—and I could feed them.”

“You’d do that?”

“Not at a sitting.”

“But you would feed them?” she pressed. “All of them?”

“Not the whole world. Just the few fools who refuse to abandon this part of it, choosing instead to starve in my shadow.”

“Nobody chooses to starve,” Lan muttered, taking another pudding.

“No? Are you certain? Do you know why I came here?” he asked suddenly. “Here, of all places on this Earth I might have taken.”

Lan looked around the room.

“Not to this palace,” he said with a dismissive wave. “What is it to me but a stack of brick and a dry roof? No, to this land. This…island.”

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say you liked it here.”

“Mark the tone in which you suggest it,” he said with a humorless smile. “It is the very voice of doubt. I put it to you: Do you like it here? Did you like the life you had in Norwood? Do you miss it?”

Lan bristled, but could not think of any answer that was both affirmative and honest.

“No. You don’t,” he said for her. “This land is shaped from bitter clay. It is cold. Hard. Men have long since stripped it of whatever natural life it held and then buried it under the choking sprawl of their own cities, which have since fallen. Its watery veins are toxic. Its enclosing seas are always angry. It has the most desolate soil, the most miserable weather, the most loveless and unfriendly landscape. It is a wretched place,” he concluded, thumping a finger on the table to emphasize each word. “Of all my wanderings, it is the most wretched place one can live. Oh, there are lands more barren,” he said as she opened her mouth to protest. “Frozen lands, sere lands, lands infected with more virulent disease and lands teeming with more noisome and lethal beasts…but these are lands that kill. And I am weary unto death, so to speak, of dying, Lan, forever dying. When I ascended, when I had the king’s cut of all Earth had to offer, I thought, ‘I will take this land and set myself within it, for it is wretched and who would ever stay where the Devil dens?’”

“But it was their home!”

“Home? Home is a word, child. Your mother could have told you of a time when humans changed their home simply because they did not like the view from the windows. No, this is not their home. This is a forsaken grey hell of stony soil set down in the very shadow of the greatest evil humankind has ever known, and the only reason to root themselves to it is to harry me. So is it not a little funny that they choose to farm this vile land and starve when they could easily travel to more arable lands?”

“Easily. You keep saying that. Through hordes of Eaters all the way to the coast and across the sea to a strange land where there are more hordes of Eaters, looking for another village willing to take hundreds of foreigners in. Yeah. Easy.” Lan shook her head, more frustrated than angry. “The more you talk, the more I think you really have no fucking clue what is going on out there.”

His thumbclaw tapped at the side of his cup. “I could move them.”

“How?” She pointed at Deimos, who put a hand back on his sword and stared back at her. “Send your Revenants to round them up and take them away? Yeah, that’s sure to end well.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Get rid of the damn Eaters!”

“No. What else?”

“You could…I don’t know! We’ll figure something out! You act like it’s one or the other—either you kill us or we kill you—but I know there’s another way!”

“In all my years, I have not found one.”

“You stopped looking a long time ago. You don’t even believe another choice exists.”

“I don’t believe dragons exist either, shall you find me one of those?” he shot back.

“One thing at a time.”

He leaned back and stared at her for some time, then shook his head and smiled, albeit in a thin, humorless way. “There was a time I thought only if you had half as much passion in my bed as in speech would it be worth having to endure your never-ending argument. Now I find myself thinking that if you had half as much passion in speech as in my bed, you could convince me.”

“Does…does that mean—?”

“No. Sit down,” he added as she rose. “I’m certain we can come to some agreement. As I have said, I reward those who please me. And you…” He reached out to brush the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “You pleased me. I know you would rather appeal yet again on the matter of my hungering dead, but you will never have that. I am, however, willing to negotiate terms on behalf of one more insignificant and ungrateful cluster of humans. You could save them. If not from my dead, at least from their own stubbornness and empty storehouses. What say you?”

Lan scowled and reached across his plate for another slice of lemon cake. “How much food are we talking about?”

“As with Norwood, I will send whatever remains of that evening’s meal.”

“Every month?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“For however long you remain with me in Haven.”

Lan nodded, tapping her cake against her plate. “Sounds suspiciously fair. What exactly is it you want in return? It can’t just be fucking, because I’m already your dolly and you get that anyway.”

“Much depends upon your enthusiasm, but my desires, as I have already said, are not so particular. Share my table. Share my bed. Be for my pleasure and pretend some pleasure in return and I will pour the wealth of Haven into my enemy’s larder.”

Lan searched his eyes, glowing coolly through the sockets of his faceless mask, then shook her head. “There has to be a catch.”

“Some might argue I am the catch.”

“Well, you’re not.”

“Thank you, that’s very flattering.”

“You keep talking like it’s so awful just to be with you, but you’re—”

His brow climbed invitingly.

“You’re not that bad,” Lan muttered, forcing another bite of cake into her stupid mouth. Was she blushing? She thought she was. Damn him anyway.

“When you tended your trees in Norwood, which took the greatest toll? The first? Or the last?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Oh, but it is. You’ve tended me twice and tended me well, but if you truly intend to purchase every human settlement in this land, you will have to preserve that energy and dedication row after row. You may be able to comfort yourself for a time with thoughts of the good you are doing, but you will never see their grateful faces.” His smile went crooked. “You will see mine.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Mm.” He picked up his teacup and scratched at the rim. “There is one more thing.”

“I knew it. What?”

“You will not mention my hungering dead.”

“But—”

“Not one word,” he warned her, leaning forward to point a claw in her face. “If you speak of them—however indirectly, even once, at any time, for whatever reason—our negotiations to feed the living of this land are concluded.” He gave that a moment’s dramatic emphasis, then took the uneaten portion of cake from her and ate it himself. “You may of course continue to press me in vain for the ending of the Eaters after that,” he said with a careless wave, “but you will never have another village fed by my hand. Is that clear?”

“Why? What difference does it make to you if I ask for one thing or the other?”

“I am under no obligation to explain my reasons. Those are my terms. Shall you agree or not?”

She spit on her hand and held it out unhesitatingly.

Quite a few conversations throughout the room broke apart at that and all heads turned when Azrael bemusedly copied her. They clasped hands briefly. His spit in her palm burned like a live coal at first, but quickly cooled to something merely hot. It called up the intensely unwanted memory of his tongue teasing up between her thighs. Suddenly flustered, Lan pulled away first, not quite able to suppress a shiver.

Azrael wiped his hand on a napkin. “Yes, it is a cold morning, isn’t it?”

She nodded, avoiding his eyes. Her palm still tingled.

“No matter. The nights are warm enough. Or will be, with you to share them with me.”

“You don’t think I can do this, do you?”

“No, but I mean to enjoy you anyway.” He ran an eye over her in a manner calculated to intimidate. “I won’t be hurrying our negotiations. And before you boast to me of your rustic mettle and incorruptible purpose, you might bear in mind, my patience is measured in centuries. You cannot win.”

Lan lifted her chin. “I don’t know what kind of girl you’re used to, but it’s clear you’ve never had one from Norwood. We don’t give up and we don’t back down.”

“But you taste just as sweet as the peaches you grow,” he replied. His head cocked. He smiled. “You blush like one, too.”

Lan drank her coffee, trying to will away the burning in her cheeks. “I’m not blushing.”

“How many times must I tell you? I do not keep company with liars. No matter how prettily they blush.” He ran a finger along the curve of her cheek, then rose. The dead court stopped talking to stand up and bow at him, but he ignored them all to bend low, putting his mouth right against her ear. “Or how sweet they taste.”

She shivered again, tight-lipped, and felt him smile.

“I’ll pretend that’s anticipation,” he murmured, straightening up. “Until tonight, then.”

CHAPTER TEN

Although she had been in Haven nearly half a month by then, that was when it really began for her. With a goal to work toward, even if it was more of a ‘delay’ than a ‘goal’, she felt herself again. It was a good feeling, one that gave her something solid to hold onto when she left the dining hall and fell again into Serafina’s clutches. She was Lan of Norwood again and when the state of her skirt was immediately called to the attention of quite possibly everyone in the palace, Lan of Norwood could shrug it off. She let her handmaiden’s mutters lead her through the palace while she thought ahead to bed that night. Not about Azrael, not about his hands or his mouth or that hoarse growling sound he made just before he came, but just the act…although it was strangely difficult to separate the two.

How many villages could there possibly be at stake here anyway? She couldn’t remember how many she’d passed through on her way from Norwood, but that alone said something: it was more than could be easily counted and that on just one road. Did waystations count? And if they did, did she really want to pay for them? There again, there were only so many days in a month, so Azrael only had so many nights to barter. Say she bought them all…

Moments from the previous night spilled through her mind, magnified by a month’s worth of repetition. She felt something. A hot, shivery feeling she refused to name. She tried to chase it off by reminding herself how cold and clammy and dead his hand was, but even in the privacy of her mind, it was a trap—she couldn’t visualize his hand without seeing it against her skin.

Enthusiasm, he’d said. He wanted her enthusiasm. Somehow she didn’t think that was going to be a problem.

Serafina brought her to an unfamiliar room, small and plain and poorly lit, whose only furnishings were a handful of gowns on fitting molds, a few shelves stacked with shoes and some boxes heaped with belts and gloves and stockings and every other kind of dolly costume. Lan extracted herself from the first dress without complaint and was cinched into another one, just as pretty and ill-fitting, but that at least allowed her to walk. Then her hair had to be rearranged to better suit the new dress and her face scrubbed off and repainted, with the dead woman muttering under her breath all the while about how impossible Lan was to work with. “And now you’re late!” she concluded, throwing up her hands before shoving Lan toward the door.

“For dinner?” Lan asked sarcastically.

“You have an appointment with Master Tempo and after that, your usual lessons.”

“Oh bugger, still? I thought I was done with that nonsense.”

“Our lord insists his warmblood women use their time in Haven to better themselves,” Serafina told her, adding, “A more perfect waste of time and effort, I cannot imagine.”

Although Lan had been thinking just that, if not in those exact words, hearing it from her unasked-for handmaiden put her hackles right up. “Well, fuck you very much!” she said irritably. “Where is this attitude of yours even coming from? What have I ever done to you?”

Serafina raised her hands in a gesture of frustration. “You are not my mistress.”

“You know what? If that’s the way you want it, fine. I don’t want a handmaiden anyway. Sod off.”

Serafina stayed, tight-lipped, right at her heels.

“I said, sod off.”

“And I do not follow your orders. You are not my mistress!” Serafina said again, her voice rising shrill and strained. “He made me for her. Only her.” She pressed her lips together, fighting with it, then burst out, “I know she’s dead, I know it, but I also know that if only I were not with you, I would be with her! You are keeping me from her! And don’t tell me it’s a lie because I already know, but knowing doesn’t make it right! So don’t tell me I can’t blame you. He made me for her and he gave me to you!”

They just looked at each other for a while and then, without a word, both started walking again.

“I’m sorry,” Serafina said stiffly. She may have even meant it, in some deadish way. “But I don’t have to like you, you know. Our lord provides well for his companions. If you are obedient to his rule, you are certain to have a comfortable life here in Haven, even after you’ve fallen out of his favor.”

This was said so matter-of-factly that Lan could not immediately take offense, but she rallied and managed. “Thanks a lot!”

Once again, her handmaiden seemed surprised. “Well, how long do you think you’ll have it, warmblood? You are very plain.”

“And you’re a bitch.”

“That wasn’t an insult,” Serafina said. “That is a fact. You are also coarse and unmannered, and that is a choice, which ought to be a far more pressing matter of concern to you.”

Lan defiantly bit at the edge of her thumbnail and spat it onto the floor. “Anything else?”

“Yes. You are opinionated and stubborn and resistant to every effort to educate or refine you. You have none of the womanly graces, no artistic talent I’ve been made aware of, and certainly no virtue, as you yourself have remarked. Above all, you are mortal. Your looks, such as they are, won’t last and then what will you rely on to hold our lord’s interest? Your charm?”

“I can be plenty charming when I try.”

“I must always just be missing it then.”

The rest of the walk was a silent one.

Lan did not recognize the room they eventually ended at, but she recognized the people waiting for her on the other side of the door: Azrael’s musicians, surrounded by their instruments, although none of them appeared to be playing, not even to pass the time while they waited for her. Neither were they in any great hurry to begin the meeting when she finally did stumble in. They looked at her; only the living flute player had any readable expression and hers was not a happy one.

“I am Master Tempo.” One of the dead musicians came forward a single step, but kept his hands clasped behind his stiff back to make it clear there would be no touching. “I shall be overseeing your musical education.”

“What’s that mean?” Lan asked warily.

The dead people exchanged a group glance.

“It means,” Tempo said, speaking very slowly, as if to a stupid child, “our lord desires you learn to play music.”

If he had told her Azrael wished her to learn to fly, she could not have been more dumbfounded. She stared at him for some time before sputtering, “That’s…What…I don’t know the first flipping thing about music!”

“Hence the need for an education. Beginning tomorrow, you will attend lessons every morning until noon.”

“Balls if I will! Every day?”

Serafina whapped her on the back of her head, hissing, “Ladies do not say ‘balls’! Stop being difficult! I told you, our lord requires his companions to better themselves.”

“Lady, I hate to tell you this, but I’m all the better I’m ever going to be. Why should I have to plunk away at one of these stupid things when I’m never going to be any good at it?” she demanded, slapping the top of the nearest piano (and trying unsuccessfully to shake away the resulting sting). “Can’t he just chain me up in the garden again if he thinks I’m going to run riot in the street when he’s not around?”

The flute player sighed and went to the window, hugging herself too tightly as she looked out into the winter rain. “It isn’t meant as a punishment. Music is a gift and a wonder.”

“For you, maybe. For the rest of us, it’s a waste of bloody time! I—” With effort, Lan bit the rest of that off, reminding herself that this lady was living and therefore probably one of Azrael’s dollies and as such just might have his ear at least some of the time. “I’m not interested,” she said instead and if she said it through clenched jaws with a scowl on her face, that was just too bad. “So, thanks…I guess. But no thanks.”

“None refuse our lord’s command,” Tempo told her. “He has generously allowed you your choice of instrument. Now. What will you play?”

“Bagpipes!”

Slap, went Serafina’s hand.

“We don’t possess…bagpipes,” the dead man said coolly. “Nor have we anyone to instruct you in their use. I’m afraid you will have to choose again.”

“You should be afraid,” Lan told him. “Because if I don’t get to play what I want, I’ll play whatever the hell it is you play. Oh yeah,” she said as his eyes narrowed. “I’m going to get my grubby hands all over your whatsis and I’m going to play it just so badly it’ll make your ears bleed. Eventually, you’re going to lose your temper. You may not think so, knowing what’s at stake, but this nobby bitch is my handmaiden and she still slaps me around even when she knows damned well one word out of me will put a pike up her muggins and plant her in the yard.”

Serafina sniffed haughtily, but took a small step aside so she wasn’t quite in line with the aim of Lan’s pointing finger.

“You, now? I know you were raised up just to play that whatsis and for no other reason and it’s going to make you sick to see me make a muck of it, isn’t it?” Lan waited, then said again, with steel, “Isn’t it?”

He did not reply, but the answer was there in the flat shine of his dead eyes.

“The truth is, you don’t want me here anymore than I want to be here, so what do you want to do? Show me which one of these bloody fool things is yours so I can start bashing away on it? Or send me off to my next appointment and see the back of me forever? Those are your options. Pick one.”

He considered and said, “Shall I be honest with you?” in the sort of voice that suggested he would, whether she agreed or not.

“Please.”

“If I had a choice in this matter, I would happily allow you to refuse our lord’s request. Our small orchestra already has a full complement of winds, strings…and warmblood whores.”

Lan pursed her lips and looked sidelong at the flute player. The flute player did not react, just kept watching the rain.

“However, it is our lord’s request and so I have no choice. I must ask you to select an instrument now or I shall assign one to you. I play the piano,” he went on. “But if I may make a recommendation, perhaps the clarinet would be more suited to you. We could use a woodwind and your…kind…seems to have more talent with your mouth than your hands.”

Lan gazed thoughtfully at the dead man. “Which one’s a claret?”

“Clarinet,” he corrected and fetched a long, black something from one of the racks on the wall. It looked a bit like a flute and a bit like a horn, and certainly seemed sturdy enough for Lan’s purposes.

Tempo handed it over, launching as he did so into the beginnings of what promised to be a lengthy speech that would help her to appreciate the significance of the stupid thing, but Lan didn’t bother to pay attention. She hefted it lightly on her palms, getting a feel for its weight and balance, and then she swung it around and whalloped Master Tempo right in his pretty face just as hard as she could. He staggered back into a rack of violins and they all went down together in a not unharmonious crash.

All the deadheads took a sharp breath. One of them rushed over, but it was an instrument he reached for and not the groping hand of his fallen colleague. His eyes when he looked up were almost living-bright with hate as he clutched the broken neck of the violin to his chest.

“You got something to say about my talents, too?” Lan asked him, hefting her new weapon.

“You’re impossible,” Serafina sighed, but went to open the door. “Hurry up, then. You’re late for lessons.”

“How could I possibly be late already?” Lan asked, stepping over one of Tempo’s sprawled legs on her way out. “I just barely got here.”

“But you’re not staying, are you?” Serafina countered. “Which means this interview was nothing but an interruption to your usual lessons, which means you’re late. Get rid of that.”

‘That’ was the clarinet, forgotten in Lan’s hand. Still in one piece, but she doubted it would ever sound the same. She held it a moment more, indulging a friendly little fantasy in which she planted it like a flag in Tempo’s upturned arse, but in the end, she settled for holding it out.

The flute player came to take it. Their eyes met and, strangely, Lan felt a twinge of shame. She’d been trying to scrape up a good line to go out on (something wonderfully bitchy and smart, maybe with a music pun in there somewhere, although she already knew she’d settle for a ‘Fuck you.’ She wasn’t good with words), but something in the other woman’s eyes made her half-formed efforts shrivel up and sink away.

Fortunately, she had Serafina sighing over by the open door, so she had an excuse to turn away first. She told herself she wasn’t slinking away, she just had lessons. She told herself she hadn’t meant to hit the dead bastard so hard and even if she did, it was only because he’d called her a whore. She told herself she wasn’t sorry and she wouldn’t look back, but she did and saw the flute player watching from the hallway with the clarinet cradled in both hands, silent.

* * *

Master Wickham was not alone when Serafina thrust her through the doors of the library. The dead woman who was her etiquette instructor was also waiting, pacing back and forth in front of the table where Lan usually did her lessons, but this wasn’t one of her etiquette days.

“Sorry I’m late,” Lan said cautiously. “I had a…another appointment.”

The dead woman swung around and glared at her. Did she know about the thing with Tempo? How could she, so soon?

“I’m aware,” said Master Wickham. “Please, come in. How did it go?”

“Not great.” Lan inched forward. “I don’t think I’m going back.”

“No? Capital. I despise upsets to my routine, although objectively speaking, I suppose it is a pity. Our lord so enjoys music—”

“Did you use your napkin at breakfast?” the dead woman interrupted.

Lan blinked. “Uh…sure. Of course I did. I always use my napkin.” She looked at Master Wickham. “What’s going on?”

“A performance review,” he replied. “And before you answer any further questions, you ought to know your tutor was in the dining hall.”

The dead woman adjusted her grip on her switch and glared at her.

Lan heaved a sigh. “Okay, fine, whatever. No, I didn’t use my napkin.”

“Put out your hands.”

“Why?” Lan asked. She knew why.

The dead woman waited.

Lan slowly brought her arms up and opened her hands.

The switch came whistling down and landed right across her palms. It didn’t hurt too bad. The sound was worse than anything, but still Lan jumped back, shaking them as the initial heat of the blow faded and filled in with that hornet-like sting, The dead woman stepped forward with every step Lan took away, never further than arm’s reach. “Did you eat with your fingers?”

“Yeah, but it was—”

“Put them out and turn them over.”

She knew what was coming, which made it that much harder to hold out her hands.

The switch howled down and lay a brand of pure fire across all of Lan’s knuckles, rapidly swelling to fill her whole hands. “Did you lick them?” the dead woman asked as Lan hopped in place, swearing and shaking them. “Did you?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember! Maybe!” Entirely unwanted, the memory of that heavenly lemon cake swam into sharp focus, and herself tapping crumbs off her plate and catching them on her tongue. “Oh damn it,” she said, dismayed.

“Put them out.”

Lan flinched, scowled, then thrust them out.

Whh-whack!

“Fuck a bag of balls!” Lan howled, bending over her throbbing hands and stomping her feet.

The dead woman’s strong fingers closed on the back of her gown. It tore, but Lan was caught anyway, caught and shook like a pull-toy in a puppy’s game of war. “Did you spit at the table?” the dead woman hissed and without waiting for an answer, commenced with the switching.

Lan ducked, her arms in a protective shell around her head and the rest of her open to getting the ever-loving shit beat out of her in a rain of lashes. She ran, hunched and yelping, crashing into chairs and lamps and books, with the dead woman always right behind her and that switch like burning brands on every part of her it could reach, which was all of them. Lan’s foot inevitably came down on the long hem of her skirt. It tore. Serafina was going to be furious.

‘At least she won’t have a bloody switch,’ Lan thought inanely and bleated laughter even through her sharp cries and swears.

The sound sent the dead woman into a frenzy which ended only when the switch broke in two across Lan’s shoulders. Before she’d recovered, she was seized by the hair and dragged around the table to be thrown in a chair.

“You utter swine!” the dead woman spat, clearing Master Wickham’s neat arrangement of books and primers with a sweep of her arm. “Nine days under my tutelage and you ate like a pig with your head in the trough! You tore your dress on purpose and you…you said the most vulgar things! You…! You…! You made me look incompetent in front of him! Well, I will not be embarrassed by the likes of you! I am going to the kitchen and when I come back, you are going to practice eating until you can do it right!”

“Eat? Lady, I just had breakfast!”

The dead woman grabbed up the nearest bin and banged it down on the table in front of Lan. “Get rid of it! And you!” She turned on Master Wickham, who raised an eyebrow at her. “Not a word out of you about how your…your silly scribbles are more important!”

“You’ll hear no argument from me,” he agreed.

The dead woman glared at him a moment longer, then turned back to Lan. “Just you sit until I come back,” she hissed. “You are not leaving this room until you have learned to use a napkin, if it takes all day and a bottle of ipecac!”

With that, she stormed away, slamming the door behind her so hard it bounced out of the jamb and came shuddering slowly open again. Master Wickham closed it properly, then clasped his hands behind his back and looked at Lan.

His quiet reproach got in under her skin in a way the dead woman’s switch-happy tirade couldn’t even touch. “Hey, I wasn’t rolling on the table with my tits out!” Lan said crossly. “I just forgot my napkin! And, okay, maybe some other stuff, but I didn’t even know she was there!”

“It makes absolutely no difference,” he replied. “The dead have no judgment, only our lord’s command.”

“He ate the cake with his fingers too, and I don’t see Miss Mannerly-Buggery-Do going at him with a switch!”

“He could eat with his feet and she would never find fault in him. He is her lord.”

“Well, it’s not fair,” Lan grumbled, rubbing at her knuckles.

“Life isn’t fair.” He gave that a moment to set in, then left her and went out into the hall. She could hear him there for some time, his low, pleasant voice parrying the clipped, hostile tones of the pikemen posted there and gradually overcoming them until, at last, he opened the door again and beckoned Lan to him.

“Where are we going?” Lan asked, although she didn’t really care as long as it was in the opposite direction of the kitchens.

“Possibilities abound. Where would you like to go? The National Gallery? The Tower? That’s a bit of a walk, but there are a number of fascinating buildings along the way. I’ve developed quite an obsession with traditional pubs lately.”

The thought of having to stand around in a bunch of empty old buildings was so depressing that it was quite a while before she realized what he was really saying.

“Are we bunking off?” she asked, blinking around at him in amazement.

“I despise,” he said cheerfully, “upsets to my routine. You were given to me to be my student until six on full days, one on half days. Today is a full day. You are mine until six.” He paused to nod at a passing Revenant. “Or until I am given new orders by one with authority to give them. However, while the library is a convenient setting for lessons, I have never been made to understand it was the only place to hold them and, circumstances being what they are, I think we might benefit from a change of venue.”

“But you said—”

“I said I wouldn’t argue. I never said I’d let her have you. Semantics, dear Lan, semantics are everything. So! Where would you like to go? I can say with certainty that Haven’s museums boast the finest collections in the world, but there is surely something to be learned anywhere.”

Lan never had much interest in exploring ruins, especially if there wasn’t going to be any salvage or hunting involved (it struck her as somewhat sinful, in fact. Wasteful. Like bathing in water), but coughing up her breakfast a few dozen times in between switchings held considerably less appeal. All the same, the persistent magnificence of Haven’s ruins had become exhausting and more than a little oppressive. If she had a choice, she’d rather go somewhere, do something, at least a little familiar.

“What about the greenhouses?” Lan suggested.

“You have an interest in gardening? The palace is beautifully kept in that regard, but if you like, I could probably arrange a car to take us to one of the old gardens about Haven. They aren’t quite what they were, but when Lady Batuuli first took an interest, my lord had many of the old sites restored and replanted. It’s rather a tricky time of year, but he always keeps something in flower for her. I don’t know that the habit will continue, circumstances having changed, but I doubt he’ll have her work uprooted. He’s not a spiteful man.” He nodded to another passing Revenant. “Not often.”

“I mean those,” said Lan, pointing out a window.

“Yes, of course you do,” he sighed, not quite resigned. “You realize those are the kitchen’s greenhouses? There’s really nothing interesting in them.”

“I think they’re interesting.”

Master Wickham stopped walking and caught at her sleeve to stop her as well. He was still smiling, but there was a faint crease between his eyebrows as he said, “People are working there. You’ll disturb them.”

“I’ve worked in a greenhouse since I was knee-high. I won’t get in anyone’s way. Besides,” said Lan, doing her best to affect a casual tone, “I might even be useful. Look, I can’t do music. I can’t read. I can’t even dress myself, apparently, but at least I know what I’m doing in a greenhouse.” She trailed off, searching his perfectly neutral face with a growing sense of hopelessness, but couldn’t bring herself to surrender. “I’d think you, of all people, would understand why someone would want to…to just do what they know they’re good at!”

“You aren’t here to work our lord’s greenhouses.”

She knew he was right, but still she snorted. “I don’t need you to tell me what I’m here for, jack.”

He started to answer, then tipped his head back thoughtfully. “Jack Wickham,” he murmured.

Lan rolled her eyes and waited.

“No,” he said at length, with an air of wistful regret. “It doesn’t feel quite right, but I do like it. Lan, listen to me. I know you’ve not known me long, but please believe that I have your best interests at heart. I do understand the appeal of doing the work you have always done, work you were made to do.” He took her hand and held it lightly between both of his, enclosing her in cold as he quietly said, “I understand it because I’m dead. And believe me when I say the job satisfaction of the dead is nothing to which you ought to aspire.”

“I just want to look around a little.” She groped for something more to say, something to convince even a dead man, and could come up with nothing better than, “I live here now, don’t I?”

“Yes, you do. You live here. But Haven is for the dead and we none of us tolerate disruption to our routine in good grace. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to leave the dead to their work.” He released her hand and smiled. “Come, now. We’ll have a walk over to Hyde Park, shall we? It’s quite green and pleasant, and if the rain catches us, there are plenty of places to pop in and dry out.”

“I promise I’ll be on my best behavior! I promise…fine.” Lan gave the window a last sour glance and resumed her aimless walk down the corridor. “Let’s just go somewhere. Anywhere. I don’t care.”

Master Wickham did not immediately join her. When he did, it was with a tap on the arm and a thin frown that told her she’d won.

He led her in silence to a door that took them outside. It had rained earlier and Lan’s slippers quickly soaked up the cold and wet, as did her skirts, which got heavier the more damp they got, until she had to hike them up to keep from stepping on them. Awkward as that was, her pace quickened and when he didn’t call her back, she reached the door of the first greenhouse well ahead of him and let herself into to its familiar muggy stink.

The dead people working there took a moment to look her over when she first walked in, then another moment to exchange glances with one another, and then resumed work. None of them spoke to her, but there was a clear sense of interruption to their routine and equally clear was their collective resentment about it. Never mind. For the moment, she was content just to look around, but if she decided to pitch in, she was confident she could keep up with the best of them.

And this was a nice greenhouse. Farming could never be made easy work, even in the best of houses, but this was as good as it came. Lan picked her way up and down the narrow aisles between the rows, holding her skirts high to minimize mudding, genuinely envious of everything she saw. The soil was black and heavy in her hand, not just raw earth and old shit mixed together. The glass panes were all perfectly intact, with a thin layer of sediment that diffused the sunlight so it could never burn even the most sensitive leaves. High on the wall, fans turned in well-oiled silence so that the air, while warm, was not stuffy. A complicated network of pipes and hoses supplied each plant with specially-treated water from one of several marked reservoirs. The crops that grew from this expert design made those in Norwood look, and taste, like weeds.

‘All to feed Azrael,’ she thought, but that wasn’t strictly true. It fed her as well and probably his other former courtesans living elsewhere in Haven. Also the favored members of his court who ate for his amusement rather than their own hunger and then sicked it politely up in private. And now, of course, it fed Norwood. Soon, it would feed other villages, too, and she felt good about that, even if it wasn’t the reason she’d come here. She’d feel better if she was making it happen through a different kind of work—the kind that got mud on her knees and under her fingernails, made her back ache and her hands blister, soaked her clothes in sweat and filled her senses with this green, growing scent—but only, she suspected, until she actually had to do it for a few days. Then she’d start feeling sentimental about the sort of work she could do in a soft bed.

Lan straightened up from her smiling, unfocused inspection of an herb box to see a dead man right in front of her, aggressively close. She moved aside, in case she was blocking his way in the narrow aisles between the rows, but all he did was move that much closer, practically pushing her into a bed of thick stalks with a strong oniony smell.

“Here, watch it,” she said, just like she really thought he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Why? Am I in your way?” He took another step toward her, forcing her to stumble backwards through the plants and into the aisle beyond it. “What are you doing here, warmblood? What do you want?”

“Nothing. Just looking.” Lan gave a little more ground, only to bump up against another dead man. And there were two others behind him, she saw, and more coming down the rows toward her. She had not felt the missing weight of her hunting knife in many days, but she did now. Her eyes went of their own accord to a garden fork stuck in the soil, then beyond it to Master Wickham, waiting over by the door. She knew at a glance neither would be any help to her, and in a last effort to defuse a situation she didn’t know how she’d started, Lan faced the one who seemed to be their leader and made herself put out her hand. “I’m Lan,” she told him. “I—”

“I know what you are.”

What, he said. Not who.

Since he was ignoring her hand, Lan waved it at the rows. “I used to work in a place like this.”

“I very much doubt that.”

Lan swallowed her first response, reminding herself of her own uncharitable comparisons between this greenhouse and Norwood’s own. “Yeah, it’s a lot nicer here, that’s for sure.”

The compliment brought out unmistakable hostility in every dead eye.

Nonplussed, Lan pretended not to see it. “We grow peaches in Norwood. Some barley, mostly for beer. A little veg, but nothing like this. I don’t even know what half this stuff is,” she admitted with a laugh. “But I’m a good worker.”

Master Wickham said her name and started toward her.

“So if you ever need another pair of hands—” Lan continued stubbornly.

“Talented as I’m sure you are with your hands,” the dead man interrupted, “I have enough of our lord’s warmblood whores underfoot. I don’t need another. Go be bored somewhere else.”

It was Tempo all over again and even knowing how badly that had ended, her first thought was how close to hand that tiller was and the gratifying damage it could do to this deadhead’s pretty face. This time, she restrained herself. Instead, with as much civility as she could muster at a moment’s notice, she said, “I don’t mean to get in the way.”

“Then get out.”

It wasn’t worth another fight.

Lan turned around and bumped into another dead man. He gave her a shove, so that she stumbled against the first one’s chest. Her long skirts caught at the crops. When he pushed her away, her legs tangled up together and she went down, crushing leeks and scraping her back on a hidden harvest marker. She kicked at him, which was a mistake and she knew it in the next instant, but fortunately, the same stupid skirts that had helped trip her up now swaddled her clumsy attack and kept her from landing even a weak blow, although she did hear more fabric tear.

“Get out,” the dead man said, grabbing her arm and flipping her over into the muddy aisle.

She tried, but her feet pedaled uselessly inside her skirts. She thrashed on the ground like a dying rat, snuffling and spitting, her lungs choked with the stink of earth and onions, until finally two strong hands slipped under her arms and she was thumped upright.

“If our lord wants to put another of his useless breathers to work under me, let him say so,” the dead man was saying to whoever had her (and she knew who had her, even without turning. His hands were perfectly polite). “Until then, she’s not welcome here.”

“I quite understand,” said Master Wickham, giving Lan a perfunctory pat as he released her. “But we all have our orders and if I choose to err on the side of indulgence, it is only because I believe it is the wisest course of action. He’s very interested in this one.”

“He’s very interested in all of them at first,” the other dead man sneered, but he moved back and when he did, the other dead people did too, clearing a path to the door so Lan could limp away on Master Wickham’s arm. One of them bumped her shoulder hard as she passed by and another muttered, “Warmblood,” at her back, but Lan didn’t respond and the rest just stepped aside.

The morning breeze hit like a slap after the close air of the greenhouse—twice as cold as she remembered, stale and grey and lifeless. Lan turned into its current, letting its chill soothe her burning face as she tried to think how it had gone wrong this time.

“You going to tell me you told me so?” Lan asked tightly.

“I can’t imagine that I have to.”

Lan shook her head, not in agreement or in denial, but just as a kind of impotent frustration. “What happened in there? What did I do to set them off?”

“Try to understand,” Master Wickham said in a hopeless way. “They may be gardeners now, but they were raised to serve in our lord’s army. To drive the living from Haven is the only reason they were made and the rage that formed the foundation of that command has made an imprint upon the very core of their being that can never be erased. To a very real extent, they have no choice but to act as they do toward you, but their feelings are not their own.”

“So you’re saying Azrael hates me too.”

“I’m not saying that at all. He’s alive, as you are. He’s…” Master Wickham frowned and shook his head. “He’s…old and strange…but alive. Whatever mood was on him when he raised his army has long passed. I certainly do not claim to know what he thinks or feels about you, but please do not think the enmity you have encountered here today somehow reflects his present mind.”

“Yeah, right. It’s not personal and I should just learn to live with it.”

“Oh, it’s very personal,” he said seriously. “But they can’t entirely help themselves, either. Being alive, that is something you will never completely understand. Life is like…” He scouted about the empty yard, then waved at her and said, “Well, like you are now, in motion between a past state and a future possibility. Death has no motion. It is a static thing, without potential or possibility. Understand?”

“Not even a little.”

“All right,” he said, undaunted. “Say I photograph you right now, mid-stride.”

“Okay?”

“You have already moved on, but that photograph never can. The step is never finished and can never be finished, but the photograph of that moment is whole unto itself. It is a complete image of an incomplete step.”

“So you can’t ever learn anything new? You’re all just frozen where you were when you died?”

“When we were raised,” he corrected. “And no, not exactly. Most of the dead who reside in Haven were raised to serve as Azrael’s army during his ascension and with very few exceptions, he has since put them all to different work, but the key is that he put them to work. His will is as fundamental to our being as your breath and blood are to you. When he commands his army to act as servants or watchmen or gardeners, they have no choice but to obey, but it is not what they were raised to do and they will always feel that conflict. Even Azrael himself cannot alter the sense of purpose with which we were originally imbued.”

“Why didn’t he—” Lan began and quickly realized what a tremendously rude thing she was about to ask. Sometimes she forgot Master Wickham was dead, like the rest of them. “Never mind.”

“Why didn’t he kill off his army and raise them again better suited for the work he would have them do in Haven?” Master Wickham asked mildly. “I don’t believe he can. As unhappy as his Children were, I’m certain he would have remade them, if he had that power. I suspect we can only be raised once. To return to my allegory of the photograph, he can either tear it up and take another or learn to live with an imperfect picture. He cannot reuse the same film.”

Lan found herself thinking back to the hapless guards who’d escorted her into her first audience with Azrael and who were very likely going to suffer for it forever, then of the guard who’d flung her a hair too forcefully into the dining hall. Azrael had ordered him impaled with all the emotion of a man ordering a fresh cup of wine, then had killed him solely to score points off Lan. More evidence of the monster who went masked as a man, she’d thought at the time, but now she wondered.

“Is he sorry he made you?” she asked slowly. “Is he looking for reasons to take it back?”

“Possibly,” Wickham replied, seemingly unbothered by the notion. “Now that I think on it, he has become rather quick to execute the dead of later years.”

“So he might regret you too.”

“He might indeed.”

“And he might kill you, if you gave him the least little reason.”

“He might.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A faint wrinkle appeared between his brows as he looked at her. “Fine,” he said in a slow, inquiring manner that suggested the words, ‘Weren’t you listening?’ without having to say them aloud. “All his dead were raised to a purpose and their autonomy restricted in some manner that they might best serve him in that purpose. I am proud to serve my lord. I take no pleasure in my work, but only in that I do it well, at his direction and to further his rule.”

“That’s horrible,” said Lan, peering at him. “Do you know that’s horrible?”

“We must define the word in different ways,” Wickham replied without sarcasm. “I regard Haven as an oasis of peace in a world of war. It knows no unrest. Its people work without resentment or ambition, knowing their efforts are always appreciated by our lord. Can you say the same of the living?”

“No. We’re messy and imperfect and we don’t always get along, but we’re our own selves. We’re free and you’re not. That should bother you, you know.”

“Why? Autonomy is not an arm or an eye; once it’s gone, you don’t miss it.”

“Because he doesn’t let you miss it,” said Lan, thrusting her face toward him and speaking slow and clear.

He leaned over to meet her, speaking just the same way. “And we don’t.” Then he straightened up, once more smiling. “I say, I am enjoying this. I hope we’ll have many more debates during your stay.”

“I’m not upsetting you?”

“Not at all. Our lord’s living companions have little or no experience with the dead beyond those you call Eaters and there’s often some anxiety in their first days. I’m happy to address any concerns you may have. Ah,” he said, frowning with some consternation at one of the windows. “I believe Miss Mannerly-Buggery-Do has spied us.”

“Oh hell.”

“Indeed. I suppose you ought to face the music, as they say.”

“Balls to that, I hate music.” Tempo’s face tried to swim up at her, all accusing eyes and a broken clarinet. She pushed it away. “You said something about looking at pubs?”

“I did,” he said, looking startled. “Now?”

“Now. I love pubs.” Lan hiked her torn skirts up and kicked her muddy slippers off. “Let’s run.”

“Run?”

“I really love pubs.” Lan looked back over her shoulder at the windows of the palace, but her etiquette teacher was nowhere to be seen in any of them, which meant any second now, she was going to be popping out one of the doors and coming right for them. “What do you say?”

“I say—” Master Wickham removed his shoes and loosened his tie, then took her arm in a strong, cold grip. “—the concept of a public alehouse has its roots in the Roman tabernae, from which we get the word ‘tavern’ and if we run two miles or so this way, we’ll come to the oldest surviving tavern in Haven.”

They ran.

* * *

Lan was very late to dinner that night. She knew she would be. The pubs Master Wickham took her to see were only a few miles from the palace and there really weren’t that many of them, but none of them were used these days and so none of them had power. Poking around in all those dark, musty buildings made it easy not to notice how low the sun was getting outside, until suddenly, it was night. They walked back straight-away, but by then she was already late for dinner and she still had to get cleaned up and dressed, an hour made to feel infinitely longer by having Serafina yell at her the whole time.

As punishment, Lan was fit into a very tight gown and laced into a corset so brutally that she thought a sudden sneeze might well crack a rib. She then had to make the long walk to the dining hall, pinched at every seam from her neck to her hips and struggling for every breath. She was feeling distinctly light-headed by the time she arrived. Hungry as she was, the sight and smell of the food was more an assault than a temptation, making her feel a bit sick just looking at it. It was almost like being drunk in a vaguely removed way, as if all the empty pubs Lan had visited today were still open on some other plane of existence and some other-Lan had spent the day drinking while Lan had plodded along behind Master Wickham, staring up at original oak beam rafters and kneeling down to study the baseboards. She felt sick, strangled. The bright lights did not seem to be fixed above her, but moved slyly about at the very edges of her vision. The colorful costumes and painted faces of the revelers blurred together, throbbing in and out of focus with every step she took. The music was exceptionally loud tonight, scraping across her ears and stabbing her sinuses, so that she didn’t even notice how quiet the rest of the room was.

She had one foot on the bottom stair of the dais before she could seem to focus beyond her own oddly swollen head and when she did, her body recognized the danger before her brain did. She froze, not immediately understanding why, only that there was danger here.

“I know I’m late,” said Lan, just on the off-chance that was what this was about.

Azrael ignored her. His plate had been cleared. The meal was nearly over. He sat with his cup of wine, looking right through her to the stage where his musicians played. She couldn’t say with any certainty it was Tempo he was staring at, but all things considered, it was a safe bet.

Lan moved her foot back off the stair. “So, you…you probably heard I had a…a bit of trouble at the music appointment. Things got a bit…smacky.”

He did not reply or in any way acknowledge she was there. He didn’t look angry, but he was.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” she went on. “I keep forgetting, I’m your dolly. If you want me to take music—”

“Spare me this pretense,” he interrupted, cutting across her words before they could limp all the way to an apology. “It’s clear you’ve not enough familiarity with penitence to imitate it.”

“I don’t…penny-what? Look, maybe I shouldn’t have hit him,” Lan admitted crossly, “but he was asking for it and if he told you any different, then he didn’t tell you the whole story.”

Azrael’s eyes flashed. “But you are, are you?”

“Give a girl a chance! I just got here! You can’t accuse me of lying before I’ve even had a chance to talk!”

He grunted, tapping at the rim of his cup, then went back to watching his musicians. After a silent second or two, he beckoned.

She climbed the stairs, but no more than that, keeping the imperial table between them. “Do you want me to go?”

“I am not shy about expressing my desires, as you ought well to know.” He indicated the chair beside him. “Join me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sit, Lan,” he said, like she was a dog and not a well-trained one at that.

She sat, perched like a vulture on the very edge of her seat, with the metal boning of her corset digging into her pelvis, and waited for the storm to break.

A few years passed. Azrael listened to the music and occasionally sipped at his wine. Determined as she was to wait him out, she just couldn’t deal with the quiet.

“Do you want me to apologize to him?” she asked at last.

His gaze shifted to her, narrowed but not without humor. “You’ve not yet apologized to me.”

“For what? I mean,” she corrected herself, “sorry.”

“For?” he inquired. His tone was deceptively mild; his eyes were very bright.

“Hitting that Tempo guy,” she answered, bewildered.

“Is that all?”

“O-okay, I guess for breaking the whatsis I used to hit him. That can’t be easy to come by these days.”

“And?”

“And?” she echoed. “Look, the blokes in your greenhouses started that whole noise and I got out of it without hardly any fuss at all.”

“Lan—”

“Wasn’t that right? What the hell else…? Serafina? Is it the Serafina thing?”

Now he looked directly at her, head cocked to an ironic angle, saying, “You have led an interesting day, haven’t you?”

“Just tell me then!”

“Where were you today?”

The question seemed to have come from a completely different fight. Lan blinked at him a few times, but the image never changed. He waited.

“Master Wickham took me to look at old pubs.”

His expression through the mask was broken by something that was almost a flinch, replaced at once by a piercing stare. “Who?”

“My lessons master.”

“Wickham.” He leaned back against the arm of his throne and just stared at her. “Why do you call him that?”

That drunken feeling grew and slumped even further out of focus. “That’s his name, isn’t it? Oh balls, no, he had another one. Uh…Larry, was it?”

“Wickham,” he said in a low, thoughtful tone. His thumbclaw scraped at his cup. “I wonder how he knew.”

“Why wouldn’t he know his own name?”

The question hung in the air several seconds before Azrael seemed to notice it, only to dismiss it almost at once. “Memory is not a comfort to the dead,” he said, then paused and almost smiled. “Nor especially to the living. I see no reason why my risen should suffer the residue of their former lives, so I grant them release of it.”

“You…steal their memories.”

“Steal, no. What use have I for the detritus of mortal thought? I would not steal them even if I had that power.” He took a swallow of wine and set his cup aside. “I destroy them. Utterly, or so I have always believed. And yet you say he knows his name.”

Lan did not like the way he said that. “Maybe he found it.”

“Found.”

“Folk used to carry cards with all their names and such on them. Maybe he found his after you raised him up.”

Azrael tipped his head, disregarding her suggestion to consider her instead. “You’re defending him.”

“No I’m not,” she said automatically and blushed. “I’m just saying, if you didn’t search the man’s pockets when you killed him—”

Azrael’s eyes narrowed. “He knows I killed him?”

“What? No, I just…” Whatever half-formed thoughts she might have had faded out of grasp. “You killed Master Wickham?”

Azrael leaned back in his throne again and looked away, thinking.

“He never said that,” said Lan, too late. “All he ever talks about is lessons.”

He grunted and scraped his thumb back and forth along the rim of his cup. “And he took you…?”

“Looking at old pubs,” she said again, glad to change the subject. “It was my idea, but let me just say that if I never see another original etched glass mirror or hand-carved mahogany bar, I’ll die happy.”

“Why?”

“It was just boring, is all. I knew better than to think there was going to be booze after all this time, but still, only thing worse than being sober in a pub is being sober in ten of them.”

“You mistake my meaning. Why did he take you to see them at all?”

“Oh.” She would have sighed, but the corset wouldn’t let her. She could only cough a little as she plucked up her napkin and used it to blot at her lips in an exaggerated imitation of her etiquette tutor. “Because I spit at the table this morning and various other criminal acts which needed a lot of switching to correct. The woman you’ve got looking after all that is a right bitch, you know that.”

Azrael’s gaze shifted behind her.

Too late, Lan thought to look around and sure enough, there she was, glowering out of the shadows like a bloody grim.

“Oh bugger,” Lan said and clapped a hand over her face. The movement pulled her sleeve too tight against her shoulder; she heard the low purr of a seam splitting. “Oh bugger!” she cried again, looking at it in dismay.

“It doesn’t fit you,” Azrael observed, watching her.

“Tell me about it, but it’s the only ‘dinner dress’ you had down there and I was already so late, she couldn’t go fetch another one. I can’t wait for you to cut me out of this damn thing.”

Azrael set his cup down, reached out and hooked one of the laces with a claw. She felt it pull even tighter for a split second before the infinite relief as it snapped and everything loosened, if only a little.

Lan sucked in a breath—not a deep one, by any means, but deeper than they’d been—and managed to smile at him. “Thank you.”

“Mm.” He gestured at her empty plate. “Will you eat?”

“I think the question is, can I eat, and no, not yet.”

He cut another lace. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

His claws passed lightly up the remaining laces, plucking at them without cutting through. “Shall we adjourn?”

“If you want to.”

He nodded once, but made no move to rise. Instead, he took up his cup again with the hand that was not playing along her spine and sipped at it. “Tell me about your day.”

“What’s left to tell?” she asked, honestly confused. “Unless you mean that music business. And I am sorry it turned out like it did, but even if he hadn’t called me a whore, I mean, really? Music?”

“I like music,” he said after rather a long pause. “And I had the foolish thought it might be a fair thing, upon some future night, to hear you play only for my pleasure. But never mind. We have other pursuits to engage us. You visited my greenhouses, did you say?”

“Yeah, the ones here in the yard.”

“Your thoughts?”

“They’re the finest I’ve ever seen, but you know that.” She tried to think of something nice to say about the greenhouses. All she could seem to remember was being pushed down and called a whore again, but damned if she’d say that. “It smelled good in there. That was new. All earthy and green, but none of the sweat. How was your day?” she asked, not without some desperation.

“And your lessons?”

“Bunked off on ‘em,” she admitted. “But I don’t mind them, not really. It was the etiquette thing I was trying to slip. So we went off to look at pubs.”

“And…?”

“They were pretty, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Everything in Haven is pretty. After a while, it gets hard to notice. And they weren’t, you know…” She waved up at the walls and windows of the dining hall. “Maybe pretty isn’t even the right word, but the ones I’d use are wrong.”

His head tipped. “What words would you use?”

Lan shrugged, looking away.

“Tell me.”

“Come on.” She played with her napkin a little, wishing she hadn’t said anything. “Can’t we talk about something else where I don’t have to sound like a fool?”

He merely waited, his fingers sliding up and down the same few laces of her corset. They weren’t as tight as they’d been, but they were still taut and made a dull thrumming sound whenever his claw hooked at one. It was almost musical, like she was an instrument he was playing. Not even really playing, but only plucking at. Tuning up, maybe.

“They were built,” she said finally. “They were…planned. They all are, I know that. But those were like…like someone knew they were going to last a hundred years. Like they knew someday I’d be walking there and they wanted me to know how proud they were of what they’d done. No, they weren’t pretty. Pretty’s good enough for looking at, but it’s not supposed to last. Pretty’s precious because it’s fragile. These were…some other word.”

“Timeless.”

“No, they had time. They’d soaked up more time than beer and you could still smell that in the boards.” Lan thought about it. It took some doing to think past what he was doing with her back. She wasn’t used to being touched. It wasn’t unpleasant…but she thought it probably should have been and that was more distracting than anything else. “They weren’t timeless, they were time-full. Not old. It’s different from just being old. I don’t know how, but it is.”

“Yes,” he said and he said it like he really understood and wasn’t just agreeing.

Lan played with her napkin, only half in the dining hall. The rest was back in the streets of Haven, not in one of Master Wickham’s pubs, but out front. Out front and looking up. “They had signs,” she said. “Time-full, like they were. Some of them were carved and some were painted with pictures. Master Wickham wanted me to see all the doings inside, but it was the signs I looked at most.”

“Did you like them?”

“No.”

She sensed more than saw his frown.

“Master Wickham said all the old shops and such used to have signs like that. He said back in the bygone, people hung pictures up because they were mostly…ill…illum…inated?”

One of the servants waiting on the imperial table snickered.

“Illiterate,” said Azrael, with a dark glance in that direction.

“Like me.” Lan played with her napkin a little more, unconsciously leaning back into his hand so she could feel it better through the layers of her gown. “Not many folk could read, so they used pictures for signs, he said. We went to this place today called The Bell and there was a big gold bell on the sign, right? The Swan had a swan. The Three Princes had three crowns. The Dirty Dick…not what you’d think. But they were all like that and not just the pubs. He said the butchers used to hang pictures of meat and bakers used to hang pictures of bread. And he said there were places called barbers where people would go just to cut their hair and they all used red and white striped poles because hundreds of years ago, the barbers were also surgeons, I guess, and the red and white stripes were meant to represent blood and bandages. Hardly anybody still knew that, he said, but they kept it on the signs. He said they were hanging signs outside of shops thousands of years ago, in Roman times, even. That they were the…something stone. Cornerstone? Of modern marketing. He said even after pretty much everyone could read, logos and brand recognition were more important to a company than the products they sold. That’s what he said. And it had been that way for thousands of years.” Lan folded her napkin over and unfolded it again. “But we don’t do it anymore.”

It was a strangely hard thing to say, but once it was out, she felt a little better. It was almost like another corset, one on the inside rather than the outside, and she’d just cut one of the laces. Not all of them. Just one. She had to stop a moment to work out how to cut the next one.

“I can’t even imagine it,” she said at last, feeling around for the knot. “Hardly anyone in Norwood can read, but we don’t hang a bunch of silly pictures out. There’s no wooden anvil over the smithy. There’s no barrel or bottles hanging over the twins’ door when they brew their beer. There’s not even any pictures of peaches on the village gate and it’s what we’re famous for. Everyone just knows what everyone does. We don’t need signs.” There, pulled tight. She cut. “We had them for thousands of years and we lost them that fast.”

“Take care, child,” said Azrael in a hard voice. “One missed word and you’ll lose the right to feed a town without ever buying one.”

“It’s nothing to do with that,” said Lan, shaking her head. “It’s nothing to do with you at all. If it had been something else that happened, like a…a meteor hit the Earth or just some old regular war, we’d have still lost it, don’t you see? We lost it, not you. And if you went away tomorrow, I…I don’t know if we’d ever get them back. I don’t know…” Her voice caught. She took a breath and cut through it. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get any of it back. We’ll never build buildings like these again. We’ll never have so many bakers and butchers that they’ll all need different names. We’ll never…We’ll never…be who we were. Never again. I felt…” She looked at him at last and found him gazing out into the room. “I felt like I was dead today. I felt like we all were.”

He said nothing, but he took his hand back.

“Because of a bunch of old pub signs.” She tried to laugh. It wasn’t very successful. “So, what did you do today?”

He shook his head, silent.

Lan picked up her napkin.

He took it away from her and set it down out of her reach.

They sat together, watching the dead court eat and drink.

“Are you angry with me?” Lan asked finally.

“No.”

“You look angry.”

“It’s the mask.”

“Take it off then.”

He glanced at her, and for a moment, she thought he might, but in the end, he only looked away again. He tapped his thumbclaw against the edge of his cup and said nothing.

Lan picked at the arm of her chair, then reached over and lay her hand on his thigh.

The white light of his eyes flickered. He set his cup down, hesitated, then rested his hand over hers. Just for a moment. Then he stood and called for his steward. “Have this packed and readied for delivery,” he ordered and looked back at Lan. “Have you a preference as to who shall receive it?”

“That’s not the deal,” she said warily. “We’re supposed to go to bed first.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“I said I was sorry. What…” She raised her hands and let them drop down on the table, rattling dishes and upsetting the perfect row of forks and spoons. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me the name of a village.”

“I don’t know! New Aylesbury!” she said, for no other reason than it was the last she’d been through, discounting the waystation where her ferryman had stopped to feed her. “Why are you—”

“Are you eating?”

“What?”

“Will you be eating?” he asked, enunciating each word clearly. He waited and when she only sat vainly seeking his gaze, he beckoned to a pikeman. “Escort her to her room. Her room,” he emphasized. “Go.”

“What did I do?” Lan asked.

Azrael did not answer. His pikeman stood at the foot of the dais for a second or two, then came up to get her, and Azrael did not do or say one bloody thing as Lan was pulled from her chair. Lan shook him off, but her sleeve, already torn at the seam, tore even more. She ripped the whole damn thing off and threw it on her empty plate, then shouldered past the pikeman and took herself away. Azrael did nothing except to turn so that he kept his back to her as she passed by, and that was fine, because she had nothing to say to him anyway.

* * *

Back in the Red Room, with nothing else to do, Lan undressed in the dark. It wasn’t easy. Without her surly handmaiden’s help, if not for the fact that Azrael had cut a few laces, the corset would have been impossible to remove. As it was, it took minutes of hopping, swearing contortions to pluck the remaining laces loose enough so that she could wiggle the damn thing down over her hips. That left her in just the gown, which seemed like a victory until she realized that no amount of fumbling, stretching or shouting could get her fingers on the fastens, which were conveniently located between her shoulderblades. Her frustrations, never exactly cooled in the first place, boiled rapidly over and before she quite knew how it had started, she was tearing at seams and ripping huge swathes of fancy fabric in ribbons right off her body.

That helped, but she ran out of dress before she ran out of angry, so she turned her attention to the bed, stripping away blankets and throwing them in heaps around her small room until she could get at the sheet. She wrapped herself up like a Roman and stomped over to the window and there stood, staring out over the lights of Haven.

She had no right to be cross with him. She knew that. She was his dolly and dollies can’t complain. It made no difference that he was also a two-faced ass who asked questions but refused to let her lie and still got snippy over the answers. Besides which, it was her fault, ultimately, because she’d run out on lessons in the first place and there was no getting around that. If she’d stayed and taken her switching like a big girl, she’d have been on time for dinner and instead of being wrapped in a sheet in this drafty old tower, she could be naked in his bed right now.

Footsteps on the stairs. A pair of boots and a pair of lighter shoes, with lighter feet in them. One of her guards, escorting another person, a woman, by the sound of those shoes. Maybe Serafina, coming to help her out of her clothes.

Lan had a moment’s guilty pang—not quite sharp enough to be panic or deep enough to be remorse—as she looked at the heap of ribbons that used to be a dress, then set her chin and boldly scraped them all together. When the door opened, she threw them at the first face she saw, which turned out to be a startled servant, most definitely not Serafina, and a guard who was only just on this side of having things thrown at him by a warmblood, even if she was his lord’s dolly.

“Now pick it up,” he told her, maintaining as much dignity as possible while strips of shiny fabric hung off his collar and puddled around his boots.

“You pick it up,” she said sullenly.

“I’ll pick it up,” the servant said with a short sigh, setting the tray she was carrying down on the vanity. “Bloody breather.”

“What’s that?” asked Lan, looking at the tray. She didn’t need to ask. She could see the pot of tea and two covered dishes for herself. “I told him I wasn’t eating.”

“He doesn’t take your orders,” the guard replied, glaring at her.

Lan lifted the cover on one of the dishes to find a cold pie and a small wedge of seed cake. Under the other cover was a small bowl of soup, still warm, and a folded bit of paper.

It was the paper that she picked up, the paper that she held while she fought, breath by breath, not to lose her temper. And when she lost it anyway, it was the paper that she kept in her hand when she threw the rest of it on the floor and stormed out. When the guard tried to stop her, she had a small explosion—something about telling him to either let her go or run her through, but she honestly couldn’t recall it clearly through the haze of red emotion she was feeling—and another when she reached the door at the base of the tower and found it locked. She beat and kicked at it until the guard came up behind her and unlocked it and then she was out and running through the palace in her sheet with that paper crushed in her fist.

The next few minutes were as the turning of a page, one moment leaving the tower and the next barreling past the pikemen guarding Azrael’s chamber to burst through his door.

He was at the bed, bending low over the girl he had with him, but he swung around fast when Lan bounced the door off the wall. The girl immediately kicked herself over to the far side of the bed, covering up what he’d only half-uncovered and rubbing hard at her cheek where he’d been touching her.

“Not in the mood, huh?” Lan said scathingly. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “Get out.”

The girl bolted. Azrael stepped back and watched her go, frowning through his mask, then looked at Lan.

She banged the door shut, marched over and slapped that paper onto his chest. “You got something to say to me, you say it to my face! You know I can’t bloody read and I’m not having your deadheads knowing my bloody business!”

He threw the paper to one side and advanced a step on her. She gave no ground; he came right up to her, close enough that she could feel the heat from his eyes and the chill radiating from his flesh together. “How dare you come to my chamber uninvited! How dare you raise your voice to me!”

“I’ll dare a lot more than that! You and me, we had a deal! And one day into it is too soon to start weaseling out!”

“I sent the food!”

“It’s not paid for!” she snapped. “I won’t be in your debt! That’s not how this plays!”

“This plays how I say it plays!” he shot back, striking his fist against his chest hard enough to dent the collar he wore and make the silver rings suturing that gash in his side jingle. “You do not set terms!”

“You set the fucking terms! You did! And then you sent me to my room and brought Miss Sniveling Thing down here to proxy me? Fuck you!” She brought both hands up and shoved him hard in the chest. It hurt her shoulders a little. It didn’t budge him an inch. “Get in that bed!”

His head tipped back. “What?”

“You heard! We’re doing this!” She yanked and stomped her way free of the sheet and threw it down at his feet, then shoved him again. This time, he backed up.

“Lan—” he said warningly.

She caught him by the belt and pulled at the buckle. He pushed her away. She pushed him back and kept pushing, herding him with her ridiculous little slaps and shoves until he hit the bed. He could have knocked her down at any time. Instead, he stood, chest heaving and hands in claws as she stripped him of the many layers of his loincloth and finally got her hands on his cock. He had not been far along with Miss Thing. She could feel him swelling, growing hard in her fist stroke by stroke, although the white heat in his eyes was real enough, too. He didn’t want her. Too bad. This was the deal and this was happening.

“Lie down,” she told him.

“With one word, I could have you impaled.”

“Impale me yourself!”

He snarled into her face, an animal sound of rage and lust wrapped together. She bared her teeth right back at him, squeezing his cock in her fist, and slowly, reluctantly, he lay back. Not all the way. Their eyes stayed locked together, unblinking, challenging, as she licked and sucked at him. Now and then, he growled. Now and then, so did she.

Gradually, his breath coarsened, but that fierce light in his eyes only grew brighter and at last, he lunged for her.

She let him take her, let him pull her atop him and fit them together, but he didn’t try to lay her down beneath him and she wouldn’t have gone quietly if he had. Her human claws scratched over his golden collar until they found an anchoring place on his rock-rigid shoulders. With that for leverage, she bent over him for a kiss. He snapped at her. She flinched back, tried again. He snapped again. She slapped him, grabbed his face between her hands and chased his mouth down. It was just the once, but she had it and when she was done, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and rode him until the headboard hit the wall.

She had no grace, no rhythm, and the closer she came to that darklight glow he put in her, the worse it got, until she was all but paralyzed by it. When he caught her hips, she couldn’t fight. She had to move as he moved her, had to break when he broke her. She was lost, a conquered thing, and when she thought it could get no worse, he threw her down beneath him, wrapped her legs through his arms and set her to burn from the inside out. She came screaming and kept screaming until her voice was gone and after that, just lay there, his until it pleased him to finish with her. She managed one last cry when he came and nothing more, not even when he dropped atop her.

She couldn’t catch her breath crushed beneath him, but it felt all right, for a change, to be breathless. She’d never done this bit before, the lying-after. She wasn’t sure what to do, so she put her arms around him. He felt awful, cool and thick and inhuman. She touched him anyway. Her fingers traveled along scars, dipped in and out of dry wounds, found bone and metal and slicks of her own cold sweat. She thought she might be hurting him, because she could feel the coiling and uncoiling of his muscles, but he never spoke or tried to move her. He let her touch him until her fingers brushed the strap of his mask. Then his whole body locked up at once and he pushed himself away.

“Don’t go,” said Lan.

“I’m not.” He worked a hand under the edge of his mask to rub at his scars, then took it off and did it right. He was careful to keep his back to her until he was done and fit the mask back on again. “This is my room. If anyone would leave, it would be you.”

But he didn’t tell her to go. He sat on the edge of the bed while Lan lay across its foot, curled as small as she could go, neither looking at the other.

“Are you hungry?” he asked finally.

“I’m all right.”

“You ate nothing at my table.”

“The corset was too tight.”

“You aren’t wearing it now.”

“I said I’m all right.”

“If I sent for food,” he said, with a hint of edge to his tone, “would you eat with me?”

“I guess, so long as it’s clear you’re the one wanting it and not me.”

“Yes, yes, and you take no pleasure from it or anything I might give you!”

“Almost anything.”

He looked at her.

She rolled one shoulder, offered half a smile.

After a tense moment, he returned it. “Impale me yourself,” he muttered and got up. She heard the rattle and rustle as he dressed and then watched him come around the bed and over to the door. He had a quiet word with the guards outside, closed the door, paused, then opened it again. She heard him ask a question with the name Christina in it, but she couldn’t make out the answer.

“Sorry I ran your other dolly off,” she said when the door closed again. She wasn’t, but it didn’t hurt to say so. “She all right?”

He grunted, moving in and out of sight on his way to the wardrobe. He shifted things around in the noisy, rough manner of a man who wants to make it clear the frilly things he was touching were for someone else and of no sentimental value to him. He brought back something long and loose and blue, tossed it at her, then sat back down on the edge of the bed and resumed ignoring her.

She fought her way into the complicated array of folds and drapes and veils, then moved over and sat beside him. Her shoulder bumped against his arm and he shifted like he might get up, only to settle tensely back again.

They watched the door together, waiting for it to open.

After several minutes, each one its own hour of prickly silence, Lan said, “So what was in the note?”

He glanced around at the floor until he found where it had fetched up, but made no move to collect it. “I forgave you,” he said in a way that suggested he had perhaps been premature, “and warned you never again to leave the palace, save under guard. The living are not permitted to wander in my city.”

“I was with Master Wickham the whole time.”

“That is the only reason you are still here.”

“I said I was sorry.”

He did not answer, not even with one of his narrow, knowing glances, but after the silence had stretched out to its snapping point, he said, “Displeased as I was when I heard you had climbed the palace wall, I did not truly consider it an attempt to escape me.”

“Why would I? We just barely struck a deal.”

He ignored that and said, “Likewise, there is nothing you could spy out in Haven that can be used against me. If you wished an accounting of my dead and all my resources, I would freely give it. Let your armies come. The dead cannot be killed.”

“What the bloody fuck, man?!” she sputtered. “I’m no spy!”

He ignored that, too. “When word came to me of your escape, my immediate thought was simply that you chafed at walls and wished to explore your surroundings. What more natural compulsion? As you say, we have just begun in our bargaining and your stubbornness will hold you far better than any chains of mine. No, I knew once your reckless impulse had been indulged, reason would follow…and remorse. And you would return. Even as the hours passed, I remained confident you would come back to me and when I, in my mercy, forgave you…”

And then he only sat, his back stiff and jaw clenched, staring straight ahead at the door.

“We’d come down here and I’d make it up to you?” Lan guessed.

“Ha. No.” He shook his head, rubbed up under his mask, then finally said, “I thought we might…pass a little time talking about the things you’d seen. Haven is a marvel, no matter what else it is, and no one living looks on it save with wonder. I no longer feel wonder and I cannot imagine I ever shall again.” He was silent a moment, then said, even more reluctantly, “I thought I might see my city through your eyes. And I did.”

Lan reached for him. He leaned away without looking at her. She put her hands together in her lap and fiddled with a fold of her skirt. “It’s not that bad. I never said it was. I never even thought it. It was just…”

“Dead.”

“Empty,” she said, but it wasn’t much better and she knew it. “Maybe…Maybe you could take me around sometime, show me the places you like? Maybe if I saw Haven through your eyes—”

“Mine? I still see it burning.” He rubbed beneath his mask again.

“Are you okay?”

He scowled at her, then stiffly shrugged and forced his hand back to his knee. “The flesh is growing in,” he grunted. “It itches.”

“Are you sure it’s not infected?” she asked, reaching for him again. “Maybe I should look—”

He caught her hand in the air and shoved it away, snarling.

She gave that a moment, then got up, not unaware of his sudden tension, but she didn’t leave. She went to the bath, took a dry washcloth from the small stack Serafina kept there, got it wet, and came back to the bed. This time, when he tried to push her hand away from his mask, she gave him a smack to his fake face. His eyes blazed, but dimmed again and he sat rigid and silent as she unfastened the straps and tossed the stupid thing onto the bed beside him.

The open wound of his cheek was no worse than it ever was, but certainly no better. She daubed at it carefully, softening the black scab that edged it and took away a few beads of the tarry substance that was his blood. It didn’t smell soured, certainly didn’t feel hot. The flesh around it looked a little raw where he’d been rubbing, but the wound itself looked about as well as any gash open to the bone could look. She kept daubing anyway, giving every inch of the thing equal attention, as much to make her point as to do any actual cleaning.

Azrael waited for her to finish, then rose and went behind the bathing screen to rummage among the little bottles he kept there. He came back with one of them and placed it, stone-faced, in her hand. He sat on the bed again, staring at the door.

Lan opened the bottle and gave the contents a sniff. It wasn’t familiar to her, but it smelled medicinal and strong, so she got a little on her fingertips and gingerly worked it in all around the edges.

“Why did you come here?” he asked quietly.

“You know why.”

“Here. Tonight.”

“Oh. That.” She shrugged and capped the bottle, taking it back to the bath. “Just another reckless impulse.”

He watched her go without moving. “You’ll have to work on those.”

“Yeah.” Lan hunkered down to wash her hands in the standing bathwater. Whatever the stuff was in the bottle, it was thick and didn’t want to come off. “You know, I was never like this in Norwood.”

“No?”

“No. Kept my head down…and my hands clean.” She shook them off and rubbed them dry on her thighs. “Did my work and paid my debts.”

“How blessed you are, to have led so tedious a life.”

“Can’t afford to be exciting in a place like that, because there’s always someone else who wants what you’ve got. Your food, your bed.” She returned to his and sat beside him, looking down at her bare feet against his cracked stone floor. “Your boots.”

“Mm.”

“There’s not enough,” said Lan. “There’s never enough and there’s always someone else out there who’s stronger than you. So you need people to know you’ll be there for them so they’ll be there for you. One person against the world never wins.”

“And yet, you’re here.”

“I’m not against the world, just you. Makes the odds about even, as I see it.”

He made a sound, not quite a laugh. “I used to be an idealist, too.”

A soft knock sounded on the door at last. Azrael reached for his mask as his chamberlain entered and stood aside for a full parade of dead people—two carrying a table, two each with chairs, one with a trolley for the settings and the last, almost as an afterthought, with food. The table was placed with some private discussion by the fireplace and swiftly laid out. Just the bare essentials, owing to the odd hour: two bowls full of white and yellow flowers, a dozen candles in silver holders, a dozen dishes each, including finger bowls, salt shakers, pepper grinders, and napkins folded to look like birds. With the last candle lit and flower fluffed, the lot of them paraded out again and only then did anyone speak—his chamberlain, keeping his eyes averted as he asked if anything further would be required.

Although the question was clearly directed at Azrael, Lan couldn’t stop a wry, “Yeah, let’s get some ice in that water. What, am I supposed to drink it warm?”

“Unnecessary,” Azrael said, showing a thin smile through the fangs of his snarling wolf mask. “That will do. You may go.”

The chamberlain bowed himself out with a murmured apology to Lan and they were alone.

“I will never understand why you need all this silly shit just to eat,” Lan said, lifting the covers on the serving dishes. Bread and cake, fruit and cheese, water and wine—nothing that needed the fuss that had been laid out to receive it.

He glanced at her, then studied her place setting, and finally reached out and took one of her spoons. “At the summit of my first ascension and after my…small vengeance for the assault I was made to suffer, I was brought before certain men…leaders of men…and we all sat down together to negotiate peace.” His mouth twisted in something that was not a smile, but pretended to be. “They set food before me. Poisoned, as it turned out, but I did not discover that until later. At the time, I knew only that I was an animal among Men. I was…filthy and bloody and naked…and I did not know how to sit at a table and eat. The poisoning was nothing compared to that.” He returned the spoon to its proper place. “I embarrassed myself then, but it was, as you would say, a long time ago and it hardly matters now.”

Lan watched him pour the wine, fill his plate and settle back to eat, all without looking at her. After a while, she unfolded her napkin. After a little while longer, she said, “Do I embarrass you?”

“No.”

“We’re not much on airs in Norwood, but I always thought I was fairly mannered-up until I got here.” She looked down at the silverware framing her small stack of plates. “I don’t know what half this stuff is for. I shouldn’t even be allowed to touch it.”

“You don’t embarrass me.”

“I see the people in your court, the way they look at me when I’m up there with you.”

Now he looked at her, but his face behind the mask was impossible to read.

“I hear them laughing at me.” She shrugged one shoulder, playing with the handle of a fork, one of many. “I tell myself it doesn’t bother me, that they’re the ones making fools of themselves, them in their fancy dress and painted faces. I guess I never really stopped to wonder if I’m the fool after all. Did everyone used to eat like this? Before?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Not even here, save for rare occasions.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because I can.” He acknowledged the pettiness of that with a smile, then returned his attention to his meal. “But if it makes you so unhappy, you needn’t resume instruction. That you talk to me when you eat is of far greater import than what spoon you use.”

“If it matters to you, it should matter to me,” Lan said grudgingly. “I’m your dolly, you’re not mine. And I’m not your only one, so…so I guess I should be making more of an effort.”

He ate his dinner and watched her play with the silverware. At last, he said, “Are you waiting for me to argue?”

“I thought this would be easier, that’s all. I thought I could be your dolly and still be me.”

“I have a withering effect upon all my consorts,” he remarked, helping himself to a small bunch of grapes. “I wish I could tell you it won’t last.”

“I don’t feel withered. I feel…I don’t know. Can I tell you something?”

“If you like.”

“I’d really like to sleep with you tonight.”

He tipped his head back to study her, then put down his cup and laced his fingers together. “If that’s the opening bid to some greater negotiation,” he said evenly, “it’s a strong one.”

“It’s not. It’s just the truth. I never slept with anyone before. I like it.” Far from encouraged by his impassive stare, Lan settled her nerves with a swallow of wine, then looked directly at him and said, “Can I stay? I mean, unless you were planning on bringing your other girl back.”

“I wasn’t, no.” He considered her, tapping now and then at the table as he thought, and finally said, “I’ve no objection.”

“You’re sure?”

“It was a pleasant way to pass the time. If you change your mind, you know the way out.”

She didn’t know what sort of welcome she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

His eyes flickered. He looked away.

“I didn’t mean that like, did you want me—”

“Yes.”

Lan fell silent. Azrael drummed his fingers once on the tabletop, then stood and thrust his hand out almost defiantly.

“Yes, I want you to stay,” he told her, glaring. “Come to bed with me.”

“Take the mask off.”

His fingers curled toward a fist, but never closed. Jaw clenched, he reached up and undid the straps holding the snarling features over his true ones. He set it on the table and looked at her.

Lan offered her hand.

He took it, pulling her to her feet aggressively, although she offered no resistance. “This changes nothing,” he warned. “Where you choose to sleep weighs not at all in our negotiations. I will not pay for it, not even the smallest piece. Stay or go, I don’t…”

She put her arms around him and awkwardly lowered her head until her cheek was pressed to his shoulder. It felt cold and hard and old, somehow, like marble.

“…care,” he finished quietly. His hand holding hers squeezed slightly. The other rose up and lit on the small of her back, neither pulling nor caressing, but only feeling. “I don’t care.”

“Me, neither.”

He bent to hook an arm under her knees, lifting her into his arms as easily as if she were a child, and carried her to the bed. He told her not to speak or look at him. He told her not to try to kiss him. He told her she was beautiful. Then he lay her down and lay beside her and he said nothing more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He was gone when Lan woke up and that was fine, because in the morning, he was Lord Azrael and she was Lan of Norwood, and there was no way for that to end well. Anyway, what did she expect him to do, lie there all night waiting for her to wake up? He had a city to run and every reason in the world to go, even if he went about it like a feral dog chewing his leg free of a trap.

Ass.

Lan collected her sheet and swaddled herself up again, reasoning that the pikemen outside had already seen her in it once and might as well get another gander, but when she opened the door, Serafina was waiting on the other side. Despite all her best protests, she had to go through the whole silly business of bathing and dressing, even though Lan was clean enough in her opinion. Her opinion did not matter.

At breakfast, Lan made a token effort to have Serafina dismissed, but Azrael would not hear it, waving away her protests that she didn’t need a handmaiden and actually laughing when she argued that bathing every day couldn’t possibly be healthy.

“What the hell would you know about it?” she’d snapped. “Nothing kills you! I could be dying from over-bathing right now and how would you even guess?”

So he stopped laughing (not quickly, but he did it), and solemnly asked her forgiveness, but he wasn’t the least bit sorry and he proved it immediately following breakfast, when he sent a pair of pretty dead men in to interrupt her lessons with doctoring rubbish. Lan’s heated protests that she was fine meant exactly nothing to them. Master Wickham sat on a chair and read a book while Lan was stripped to her skin and fingered from teeth to toes. The curtains were wide open the whole time and it took more than an hour because the clock in the room chimed twice. She could see people walking back and forth from the palace to the greenhouses and if any one of them had looked around, they could have seen her through the colored glass with her tits out and a thermometer up her bum.

‘A dolly can’t complain,’ she told herself, every muscle locked and trembling from humiliation, staring straight over the doctors’ bent heads at the sad eyes of the lady in the colored-glass picture. ‘A dolly’s owned, every piece, and a dolly can’t complain.’

And that held her just fine right up until the one doctor wanted her to lie down on a table and let him have a look at her works.

“The hell I will!” she exploded, slapping at his pinchy hand when he tried to direct her backwards.

“Our lord commands—”

“Your lord can kiss my ass! I’m fine! Give me my clothes!”

He did not. He simply turned and called for a guard.

“Lan,” said Master Wickham, still seated with his back turned and a book open in his lap. “Lie down and behave. This is for your own good and it is going to happen.”

“Balls!” she shouted, and there were a few other words said when the guards reached her, but it ended with Lan on her back on the table and four dead men holding her by the wrists and ankles while both doctors peered between her wide-open legs. They muttered to each other in doctor-speak, poking at her with their cold hands. One of them produced a medical-looking thing and stuck it up in there a little ways, giving it a little swish-around before dropping into a bottle to be ‘tested’. They stuck her with a needle and took blood out. Then they stuck her with another needle and put something in. They stood there while she lay naked and splayed and chatted an easy ten minutes about “environmental factors” and “nutritional deficiencies” before finally allowing her to be released.

“Impress upon your student the vital importance of basic hygiene,” said one of the doctors as Lan struggled, swearing and trying not to cry, back into her too-tight dress.

“If she’s going to wallow in the mud with pigs, she shouldn’t be surprised to pick up ascariasis,” the second doctor said with a sniff. “And if she wants to be treated for it, she’d better show some decorum when we come back.”

Master Wickham saw them and the pikemen who had been conscripted to act as Lan’s living shackles to the door, then closed it and looked at her.

“Bastards,” she said. She didn’t like her voice; it shook. She raked her hair into place with a hand that also shook and lurched back to her lessons chair. “I’ll show them same bloody decorum.”

“You will,” he replied in his sternly polite way. “Because they may be going about it rather poorly, but they are in fact helping you. And they are doing so at our lord’s command, so really, there’s no stopping them.”

“They’re not helping me. How is day-tripping up my damned gangway helping?”

“They were examining you.”

Lan blushed hot. “I’m clean. I’m always careful and I’m clean.”

“Be that as it may,” Master Wickham said after a meaningful pause, “they were also looking for evidence of illness, infection, parasites, poor diet…” He spread his hands to indicate the scope of the problem, then came back to join her at the desk. “The living conditions outside Haven have created a crucible of diseases, many of which could easily lead to serious complications or even death, if they are not treated. The dead don’t get sick. Neither does our lord. I understand the examination is invasive and uncomfortable for you, but it is entirely to your benefit.”

And maybe it was even true, but she hadn’t asked for it and she wasn’t grateful. That night, after dinner (boxed up and sent to Ashcroft), she went angry to his room. If he’d asked her what the matter was, she would have told him. He didn’t and after sex, she went back to her own room in the tower and slept angry on the floor.

A night on the boards in the Red Room went a long way toward making her see his side of things, though. After all, she’d been the one to suggest she could be dying. Just because she hadn’t meant for him to take that seriously didn’t mean he shouldn’t. And no matter what else it might have been, it was a thorough doctoring, which was better than she’d ever had in Norwood. Moreover, it was a comfort to know she was all right, because no matter how careful a girl was or how fit a johnny looked, there were no guarantees.

But there were a million stairs in that tower.

She went down to breakfast, not quite ready to apologize, but at least ready to be better company than she’d been the previous night, only Azrael wasn’t there. No one was, apart from some servants and some guards and Serafina, who told her to hurry up and eat because there was a car waiting to take her to something called a tailor.

“What’s that?” Lan asked apprehensively.

“That,” Serafina sniffed, “is your reward for being a sulky beast all evening.”

She didn’t know what to expect, but she tried to be ready for anything, and imagining the various unpleasant things that might be waiting at the end of the short drive ruined whatever excitement there might otherwise have been in the outing. Her apprehension was ridiculously mislaid, however. A tailor turned out to be nothing more than a huge group of pinchy people who made clothes. Just clothes. Nothing else. One of them had a book of pictures—not an old one, either, but brand new—with a different dress on each page and another book with pieces of fabric and another book with samples of the dyes they could use. Lan was supposed to pick a picture of a dress she liked and a fabric she liked and a color she liked and the tailors would make a dress. Bored and baffled by just why Azrael thought she would be any good at this tailor-stuff, but determined not to repeat the episode of her one music lesson, Lan picked a number of combinations at random before the woman with all the books sharply told her that she was going to have to wear these ‘catastrophes’ and maybe she’d ought to put some thought into it.

“What do you mean, I’m going to have to wear them?” Lan looked down at the dress book again, stunned. “These are for me?”

“What did you think we were doing here?” Serafina snapped.

She blushed, too embarrassed to admit she had never in her life worn something new, something made just for her and no one else. Her clothes had always been salvage, handed down from someone else who’d had it from someone even older. There were patches on the shirt she’d worn to Haven that had come from the dress her mother had worn on the boat that brought her to England. Anything better than drop-spun wool and smoke-cured hide were too expensive and new clothes were a silly thing to spend that much money on. As long as they kept a body warm, who cared what they looked like?

She could say none of this to these people. No one here was wearing patches. All their clothes were cut from whole cloth. Their hems were straight. Their seams had never been let out. The white cloth of Serafina’s simple shift had no stains, no loose threads, no mismatched sleeves. When they tore a hole in something, they probably just threw it away.

“Can’t I just get some trousers?” she asked hopelessly. “You can make those too, right?”

All the pretty tailors stared at her.

“My lord desired you to have gowns,” one of them said in a voice like spring frost.

“He doesn’t have to wear them, does he?”

She could see the argument made no difference to them. She shouldn’t have even bothered asking. What dolly ever had a choice about how it was dressed?

So Lan had to go back through all the pictures and fabrics and dyes, and this time, she had to care about what she was doing. Morning gowns. Evening gowns. Gowns for going out and gowns for sitting in. Heavy winter overdresses. Light summer chemises. Several gowns at least in different colors and every possible style for every possible occasion. Then she had to stand there like a scarecrow while the tailors measured every inch of Lan’s body several times and from several angles and the one writing all the numbers down muttered over and over about the waste of time and cloth. “She’s grossly underweight,” she kept saying. “In two months, she’ll be splitting out all the seams and be right back here for more.”

“In two months, with any luck, he’ll be done with her and she’ll be gone,” Serafina said and sniffed. “Trousers, indeed.”

That night at dinner, Azrael asked if she had seen the tailor and she said she had. If she showed less excitement than he’d been expecting, he did not comment. What was there to say anyway?

She’d hoped that was the end of it, but apparently, the tailors weren’t very good at their job, because the next day, Lan was right back in the shop, naked and shivering while fabric was pinned together around her. And the next day, and the next, until it became her new normal: breakfast, a short drive, a long day being stuck with pins, then a few hours of lessons in the library before her bath, then dinner, then bed with Azrael. If her dress that night was in any condition to wear, she’d put it on and go up the thousand tower stairs to sleep on the floor in the Red Room. If it wasn’t—as it frequently wasn’t—she’d sleep in his bed, invariably waking alone the next day to start all over again.

The first set of gowns was waiting for her after lessons before the moon turned. Ten of them, some for mornings, some for nights. Two tailors came with them and made Lan try them all on, one after the other, to make sure they fit the way they were supposed to. None of them did. After struggling to peel the third one off without popping its straining seams, one of the tailors brought out her little book and the other his measuring tape and they began loudly to compare numbers.

Lan had no choice but to stand there with her arms up, listening.

After they were gone, she went over to Azrael’s wardrobe and stood a long time in front of the shattered mirrors, staring into each broken piece of a stranger’s body until Serafina came over and slammed the doors. “Get in the bath,” she ordered. “I actually have a chance of getting you to dinner on time tonight and I’d like not to waste it letting you, ha, admire yourself.”

“I’m not going to dinner. I have a headache,” said Lan, which was not true. Her head did not hurt at all, it was only too small for the thoughts that were in it.

“I don’t care! My orders—”

“I’m not going.”

“We’ll see about that. I advise you to dress, warmblood, because when my lord orders his guards back down here to drag you to the dining hall, they will do it whether you are naked or not.” Serafina sniffed and stalked away. The door slammed.

Lan waited until she knew no one was coming for her. She opened the wardrobe again and found a dozen eyes already staring back at her.

There were no clocks in Azrael’s chamber, but there were no clocks in Norwood either. She did not need them to know that hours passed, slower than they might have passed if there had been a window, but hours all the same. She went from the wardrobe to the bed, from sitting to lying down and from lying on top of the blankets to under them. She was cold, but she didn’t dress. She was tired, but she didn’t sleep. She waited.

When at last the door opened, Lan did nothing. She watched, silent, as Azrael moved through his dark room and behind the screen of his bathing area. He removed his mask, set it on its block, then knelt and swished his hand through the water that was always kept heated. He grunted, daubed at some of his open wounds, then went to the fire and did something to turn the flames higher and brighter. He stayed there for some time, one arm resting on the mantel, neck bent, just gazing into that false, steady light.

She must have made a sound. She didn’t think she did, but there must have been something, maybe just that itchy feeling a person gets when they feel someone staring, because he lifted his head suddenly and looked around, right at her. His eyes glowed hot, startled. He took his arm off the mantel and made an odd, aborted motion toward his masks, but never quite touched them.

They looked at each other.

“I wasn’t expecting you tonight,” he said at last. “You needn’t have come if you’re ill.”

“I’m not.”

He nodded, unsurprised, and gave her a grim sort of smile. “If you’ve come to convince me to feed Luffton, you’ve come too late. Tonight’s feast has already been taken to my pigs…less a small tray I had sent to your room.”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, but the part that struck the deepest chord was the last part, so that was what she answered. “Thanks.”

It took the edge off his smile. He held onto it for a little while longer, then let it fall away. “Have we come to the end of it so soon?”

“No.”

His eyes narrowed, flaring bright and dimming again with his unknown thoughts, but all he said was, “Then why are you here?”

“I wanted you to see me.”

“Curious phrasing.”

Lan folded back the blankets and stood, naked, beside the bed. “Look at me.”

He held her stare for perhaps half a minute before his wavered and dropped. She watched his gaze move over in his unhurried, intense way. She knew what he was seeing: her face, all its high northern edges smoothed down; her breasts were rounder; her thighs, heavier. When he came back to her eyes, his expression had changed, although it was hard to say how.

“How much would you reckon I’ve put on?” she asked evenly.

He tipped his head back, then rolled one shoulder and folded his arms across his broad chest. “Not yet enough.”

“So it was deliberate,” she said and snatched a coverlet off the bed to wrap up in. “I knew it.”

He reached out to shut the door even as she opened it, stroking her hair while she yanked in futility at the latch. As soon as she gave up and stormed away, he took her place, leaning up against the door to watch her pace and making no effort to disguise his amusement. “Come now, you cannot consider this an overabundance of flesh. What was lean, I have made lush. What was ravaged, now restored. I have made you beautiful.”

“You said I was beautiful before,” she said accusingly.

“But I fed you.”

“You’re not even sorry, are you?”

“What have I to be sorry for?”

“You’ve ruined me!”

He reached out on her next pass and caught her, using the blanket like a net to pull her, struggling, to him. His arms closed her in. His hands, rough with scars, exposed and thoroughly explored each new curve. “Hardly a ruin,” he murmured huskily against her ear.

“Look at me!” She glared down at herself in frustration. “I’m starting to look like one of those women in the old magazines and meanwhile, folk are breaking their backs farming and eating roach stew.”

“If they are, it is only because they, in their perversity, have shunned the fine food I had sent to them. And you…” He turned her to face him, keeping her pinned tight against him with one unbreakable arm while pinching hatefully at her chin with his free hand, grinning his most infuriatingly knowing grin. “You cannot be as upset as you pretend.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

Why indeed? It wasn’t the weight. Lan had always resisted the idea that she was ‘too’ skinny, but she had seen pictures of how it used to be and she knew it wasn’t normal to have so many bones showing. She knew she wasn’t fat. She was far from fat and even if she was, big deal. One winter in Norwood would put her right back in her old clothes with room to spare. But the fact remained, she wasn’t skinny anymore, ‘too’ or otherwise.

Logically, she knew the only reason for her new figure was that she’d been eating better food more often. That was it. Full stop. No deeper meaning. Some of the worst people she had ever known—Sheriff Neville sprang immediately to mind—were lean as rakes, so weight was certainly no measure of a person’s principles. Nevertheless—

“Honest people suffer together,” Lan insisted. “Honest people starve. You’ve ruined me.”

“Corrupted, perhaps. I say again, hardly a ruin.”

“And everyone can see it!” she said, pinching at her hips. She could barely even feel the bone now. “How can I go home, looking like this?”

His brows drew together in one unguarded moment and smoothed themselves out in the next. “How do you mean?”

“They’ll never take me back like this. Never. I could wrap myself in burlap and it would still show. It’s in my face. It’s in my hands! All they’ll have to do is look at me and they’ll know where I’ve been all this time.”

He did not respond, except that the fingers of his hand drummed once on her hip, as if he were not listening to her at all, but only waiting.

“Try to understand,” she said, already shaking her head because she knew he wouldn’t, he wasn’t even trying. “I was barely one of them to begin with and now…like this…”

“No matter.”

“It matters, damn it!” she insisted. “A village isn’t a lot of bodies taking care of themselves, it’s a lot of people making one body and that body is real quick to protect itself from outsiders. So it matters, because I can’t afford to be one. It matters because I have to live there!”

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

“It’s not just Norwood! I don’t look like anyone anymore! I could go anywhere…”

The words trailed off and the rest slipped away, forgotten. He continued to gaze at her in that same unblinking way.

Her first thought was a wordless pulse in the vague shape of a question, but it flickered and went out without ever fully forming. She did not ask what he meant. She did not say, ‘But you said your Revenants would take me anywhere.’ She didn’t even tell him to let go of her. She just said, “If I’m a prisoner, shouldn’t I be back in chains?”

“If you’d prefer them,” he replied. He moved one of his hands from her hip to her wrist and lightly squeezed, miming shackles. “I could even arrange time in the meditation garden, if you believe suffering will help you accept your fate, but it would all be for show. You do not want to wear chains and we both know it.”

“Don’t tell me what I know.”

He smiled again. This time, he looked like he meant it, which was annoying. “I know you will not leave until you have what you came for. Or has that changed?”

“No,” she said stiffly. “It hasn’t.”

“And I know I will not relinquish my hungering dead. That will never change. So we will speak no more of who will take you in when your purpose is resolved. For now, we are agreed your home is here.” His eyes dimmed slightly. His hand drifted from her back to her buttocks, pulling her against him. “And you do not wish to leave it. You’ve grown accustomed to my bed.”

“So, what? You’re just going to keep me in it the rest of my life?”

“How curious. You say that like I would then have to stop.”

“Oh, you are just all kinds of ass tonight, aren’t you?”

“And you are a terrible diplomat,” he replied with a laugh.

“Oh yeah?” Not her best argument, but after a moment to cool, she was able to follow up with something better. “Which place did you say we were dicing for?”

“That prize is lost,” he said, no longer smiling. “You knew the terms. You chose to forfeit Luffton when you chose not to pay the full price.”

“You are absolutely right. So if I didn’t share your table,” Lan countered, “there’s no point me sharing your bed. Turn me loose.”

His eyes narrowed. His claws pricked lightly as his hands flexed on her body, but he did not release her.

“Or maybe you’d be willing to come down some on the price and offer up a bit less. Even just a bag of beans or a crate of veg would be enough if it’s coming every month.”

“I suppose something could be found.”

“Is that a yes?”

He drummed the fingers of one hand against her hip. “This is extortion.”

“Whatever works.”

He gave her a dry laugh, just the one. “Now it’s diplomacy.”

“But is it a yes?”

He let go of her. Lan had just enough time to feel that first startled sting of what she told herself later was just disappointment in a broken barter and then he put a claw up to her face.

“This once,” he warned. “Never again.”

“I promise.” She reached for his belt buckle.

“Mm.” He eyed her mistrustfully, allowing her to undress him. “You take advantage of my generous nature.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s something you learn growing up in a small village: Everyone’s got to do what they’re best at.”

* * *

Waiting was something else a person learned growing up in a place like Norwood. Even with the best equipment and seed, farming always came down to time and how to fill it. Lan knew she had not been a particularly good farmer, but she had always thought she was good at waiting. She prided herself on being adaptable when problems arose and practical when it came to solving them. She was not known for her patience, but she was persistent and most of the time, one was as good as the other. She believed she was not afraid to die, or at least, she believed she could die well. Although she had never anticipated becoming Azrael’s dollygirl, she had accepted that life believing it would never change her.

But it was already changing her. And that changed everything.

Her patience for this game (and it was a game. Knowing that she did more good playing it than by asking Azrael to give her something deep down she knew he would never give did not make it any less a game) was gone, shattered like the mirror in which she had seen her new reflection. Now every day that slipped fruitlessly away from her added another measure of urgency to the next. She wanted this over, but there was no speeding it along. Each day was nothing to her but a routine, played and replayed without any sense of progression, only the occasional unpleasant revelation to prove that time was indeed passing while she stood still. How many meals had she eaten before she noticed what they were doing to her body? Too many, clearly. How many letters did she thoughtlessly trace under Master Wickham’s patient instruction before she looked at the single word written on her primer’s cover and suddenly understood it was her name? Impossible to know. How many hungry people were fed because Lan paid for them in Azrael’s arms? She only knew that she felt no victory when she heard him order another delivery, only a mute frustration that there were always more to feed and meanwhile, the Eaters were still out there and she couldn’t even say anything about them.

Her gowns came. She wore them, one after the other, hating them and hating them even more every time Azrael complimented her on the fit or the color. He gave her jewels. She put them in a box and put the box in a drawer of the vanity way up in the Red Room where she rarely even slept anymore, but Serafina still went and got some nearly every night and Lan wore them, lovelessly, at dinners. At lessons, she spent a lot of her time just staring out the windows. When the weather was nice, Master Wickham took his lessons out of doors to the well-kept lawn, only so she could spend her time staring at the palace.

She saw little of Azrael during the days. Half the time, he didn’t even take breakfast with her, just sent Serafina in with a tray in the mornings. Worse were the times he didn’t show up for dinner either and there was nothing in all the world that felt quite as foolish as dressing up fancy and sitting alone at the imperial table, being waited on by thirty servants and guarded by thirty guards. At night, in his bed, he could make her feel like she was all that mattered to him, but she always woke up alone. Sometimes her pillow was wet, as if she’d been crying in her sleep, but she was not aware of feeling sad, only frustrated and trapped.

When the end came, it came suddenly. One night, when she arrived in his chambers to make the day’s final payment for another settlement, Azrael told her there were none within convenient reach and did she still want an audience, knowing he would refuse her request? She did and she proved it, and after she’d asked him to put an end to the Eaters and he’d declined, he propped himself up on one elbow to give her a pensive stare and said, “It must be true what they say in the old tales. A selfless love for all humanity lends a true hero strength beyond Evil’s understanding.”

She peered at him, knowing there was a joke in that somewhere and suspecting it was aimed at her, but unable to see it clearly. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I never believed I would run out of villages to offer you before you exceeded the goodwill to buy them from me. I’ve underestimated you, Lan.”

“Ha.” She gave him a friendly punch to the shoulder, which he accepted in good grace. “You just remember that you said that, because you’re going to say it again someday.”

“If you believe that, you’ve underestimated me.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see whose estimates are lowest when I walk out of here and the Eaters are dead.”

“They’re already dead.”

“You know what I mean.” She rolled over, pulling a pillow under her head and punching it fat. To think of all the nights she’d slept on her coat or her rucksack, or with no cushion at all, but now could not sleep if she did not have this particular down-filled pillow plumped up in just this way. “Life is a funny thing,” she said, not meaning to say anything. When she got tired, words had a way of spilling out.

“The humor often escapes me, but I’ll take you at your word.” He brushed a knuckle down her bare back until he met the rumpled folds of the blanket, then took his hand away. His eyelight glowed warm on her skin, but not as warm as it had been on previous nights.

“Something else on your mind?” Lan mumbled, drowsing.

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re dim.” She lifted a hand and made it into most of a fist, poking out her first and last fingers. The shadow-bunny this produced was huge on the wall, but very faint, all its edges blurred away. “So let’s have it,” she said, letting her arm drop and pulling the blanket up a bit higher. “I’m listening.”

“You…” he began, only to lie silent for a good minute or three, with that the only word between them.

“What about me?” she prompted at last, mainly to keep from falling asleep on him.

“I wish I knew,” he murmured. In a stronger voice, very nearly the one he used to give orders to his deadheads, he said, “You have provided me many pleasant nights, diplomat, and your people have greatly profited from our alliance. I’ve no wish to see it end. Let us negotiate a renewal of terms.”

“Right this minute?” Lan heaved a sigh with her eyes shut. “You going to end the Eaters this time around?”

“No.”

“Then it can wait until morning.”

Something itched at her shoulder. Lan brushed it off, realizing too late that it was his hand and not a loose thread or lost spider after all. She reached back in apology, groping until she found his arm and could pull it around her hip. There, he let it rest as if it were some inanimate thing separate from himself, but as the minutes passed, she felt him begin to relax and finally truly embrace her. That was nice, in spite of the chill, unnatural feel of him, but it wasn’t restful and the longer it lasted, the further she fell from sleep.

“What new terms, exactly?” she asked at last.

“One shipment of food each month may keep your people from starvation, but likely, they yet know hunger. As I have heard it said, give a man a fish and you only feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him all his life.”

“We already know how to fish. We just don’t do it because it takes a long time and the woods are full of dead people trying to eat you.”

“It’s a metaphor, Lan. I offer seed from my stores, a gift given once that can sustain your people forever after. Would that not be worth…say…one month? Twenty-eight days and nights of your good grace to buy fuller stores every winter that follows, a fuller table at every meal? Would you not call that a bargain?”

“I would,” Lan agreed, “but space in the greenhouses is at its limits already. We’d have to stop growing one thing to grow something else we know nothing about, something that might not even take in our soil. It’s a nice thought, but we just can’t afford to take that kind of risk.”

“I could send supplies enough to build a new greenhouse, then. One equal to any found in Haven.”

“Where?” she countered. “Every inch of Norwood is spoken for. Those walls went up when there were twenty people scratching out a life there. Now there’s more than eighty. You going to build us new borders?”

“I will not armor nor arm my enemy,” he said. His fingers drummed once on her hip. “But I will give blankets. Cookware. Farming equipment.”

“We have all that.”

“But have you anything in Norwood that has not seen thirty years of use and repair?”

“Are you seriously suggesting I sell myself for a garden fork just because it’s shinier than the ones we’ve got?”

“Do not be so quick to dismiss the value of extravagance in a world of survival. When the scavengers come to your town, which of their wares sells for the highest price? Food and water? Or sweets and ribbons?”

“If Elvie Peters wants a new ribbon in her hair, let her walk to Haven and ask for one.”

“Ashcroft,” he corrected with a smile in his voice. “You only walked to Ashcroft.”

“I could have walked all the way if it wasn’t for the Eaters.”

“Yes, and you could have flown if you had wings.” His sigh stirred her hair. He combed it into place again with careful passes of his claws. “Never mind Norwood then. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you want? What, truly? There must be something.” He took a calming breath and hid the mounting frustration in his tone behind a low, cajoling growl. “Some long-held wish, fragile and a little foolish. Something you always knew you would never find in the low village of your birth, but which I can give you. Only I.”

“There is, actually.”

He sat up at once, looming over her like a vulture, one hand raised and hovering in the air above her, poised to seize hold. “Name it.”

“End the Eaters.”

He exhaled in a curt, coarse rush and lay back down. “You are the most obstinate human I have ever known.”

“Tee hee,” said Lan, not bothering to open her eyes. “How you flatter me, sir.”

“Do you think you are the first to ever stand before me and demand an end to the hungering dead? One month in my palace, at my table…in my bed…was enough to soften the resolve of all your predecessors. Yours has only grown. Why? Why do you keep asking when you know the answer will never change?”

“I realize those are whatchits…those questions you only ask to sound all brooding and dramatic—”

“Rhetorical.”

“Right, those. But I don’t care. I’m going to answer anyway. How’s that for confidence?” She twisted around to look at him, to see his impassive face and the steady light of his eyes when she said, “What’s happened to the world is obscene. It has to end. It has to. And until it does, I will never stop asking.”

“I have heard many ‘nevers’ in my time, child. I have outlived them all.”

“Then this’ll be another first for you, won’t it?”

He grunted and took his arm back, moving away from her on the bed, but not leaving it. Not yet. “I don’t know why I tolerate your insolence.”

“Because I do that thing you like with my tongue,” she said, unruffled, and resettled herself.

“That must be it.” He was quiet, albeit in a distinctly unquiet way, for several minutes more, long enough that she was nearly asleep in spite of her best intentions when he suddenly said, “Are you married?”

She had to turn all the way over and look at him to make sure he’d really said that. Oddly, when she saw that he was indeed serious and expected an answer, her first impulse was to laugh.

The glow from his eyes perceptibly brightened. “Why is that funny? Do they no longer marry in Norwood?”

There was a hint of a sneer on the last word.

“I’m not the kind of girl you marry,” she told him, turning back onto her side to sleep. “I’m the kind you fuck behind the smoking shed and hope your mates don’t find out.”

“Is that why you came to me? In the hopes I would set you at my side for the whole of the world to see?”

She snorted.

“Apparently not. Is it a child then?”

“Is what a child?”

“The reason you came here.”

“You know why I came here.”

“I know what you came to do. Your motives yet confound me. If it isn’t a man or a child, who is it? Who has your love in Norwood?”

That was definitely a sneer.

“No one,” she said. “Norwood isn’t exactly known for its open arms when it comes to strangers. Hell, Timmus was just from Drybridges, three towns over, and he’s still ‘that foreigner’ after twenty years. Me? My mother was born in America. She was ‘that damned Yank’ until she died and I’ll be ‘that little Yank’ until I die.”

“You were born there, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Your father was one of them, was he not?”

A hard, thin face tried to come into focus, bringing with it the phantom smell of hot tea and wet dog. Lan grimly pushed it all away. She was sleeping. “So?” she said again, with a bit of an edge. “It’s not like I knew who he was. I’m not even sure if she knew. I was nothing to them.”

“Then let them go.” He caressed her shoulder and, when that had no effect, gripped it suddenly and pulled her onto her back, looming over her with his face too close and his eyes too bright. “You owe them nothing. They can give you nothing. What can it profit you to play this childish game? Leave them to their fate.” His voice softened, roughened. “Give yourself to me and I will give you all the world.”

“I don’t want a dead world.” She put her hand over his before he could take it back and held it there. After a few false starts, she said the rest of it: “But I will stay with you, if—”

“Yes, I know how this song ends.” He shook his head, almost but not quite smiling. “And how long do you propose to remain my prisoner, if I were to agree? I will not,” he added. “But you make me curious. How do you balance your company against my hungering dead? Shall you give one hour for each corpse that lies down sensibly dead? One month for each village freed from their predation? One year for each year this world has known them? However shall you make it seem convincingly equivalent to me?”

“If you give it all, so will I.”

“And this means what, exactly?”

Lan took a bracing breath and sat up. She reached out and took his hand. He let her lift it, unresisting, and watched without speaking as she kissed it and placed it on her neck. She shivered, but only once. She waited.

Azrael was no longer smiling. His eyes, dim and playful only moments ago, were now almost too bright to meet. “And this means what,” he said, without a trace of humor or curiosity, “exactly?”

“It means…It means you can keep me,” she said. His slack hand on her neck was cold and heavy, and holding it there was starting to feel a bit ridiculous. Lan let go of him and pulled the blanket up, pretending it needed all of her attention so she wouldn’t have to meet his burning stare. “If you end them, you can keep me.”

“Keep you,” he echoed. “How coy. One wonders how sincere the offer can possibly be, when you do not dare to speak it aloud.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do. But do you?” Between one breath and the next, the dry distance of his tone closed and his face was right there before her, all sharp teeth and freezing heat. “Say it. Say it, if you mean it.”

The words he wanted rose as far as her throat and stuck there. “Raise me up,” she said instead. “Tonight, if you want. I’m ready.”

He stared at her, his chest moving harder and harder with his breaths, but making no sound. Throwing back the blanket suddenly, he got up, keeping his broad back to her as he gathered his clothes.

“Where are you going?” Lan crawled to the edge of the bed, watching as he dressed, searching out one last coin in her empty purse, anything with glimmer enough to hold him just one more minute. She found none. “I said I’m ready!”

He cinched his belt tight, kicked his golden collar out of the way and picked up his mask.

“It’s all right!” she insisted. “I know you don’t want another…another…” His unexpected rage made it difficult to remember the right word. “…sick elephant. I get that. I do. But I won’t be one, Azrael! You don’t have to take my memories away to make me stay with you. When you raise me up, it’ll be the real me!”

He turned on her with his eyes blazing, throwing the shadows of the bedcurtains at crazy angles so that the whole room seemed to spin around her. “And that’s all that’s stopping me, is it? The thought that I would create another mindless, tittering fool for my dead court? Were it not for that, I would have raised you up long ago, for surely I kill all my bedmates who provide me pleasant enough sport!”

“What? No! I didn’t mean…” Her voice failed and would not come all the way back in. “I thought…I thought this was what you wanted.”

His head rocked back as from a slap. “You what?”

“You just said to give—”

“Not your life! I’ll own no part of that! That is entirely your foolishness!”

“Foolishness?”

“You think you can buy the world with the promise of your body! How shall you not be a fool?”

“At least I’m buying it dear,” she shot back. “You’re the one selling the world for sex, so who’s the fool here?”

His mask was unchanging, but the tendons in his opened throat creaked ominously.

Lan rolled her eyes and raked a hand through her hair. “I didn’t mean that. Look, can’t we just…I’m ready to die for you here!”

“Not for me,” he sneered. “For your cause.”

“But if it was for you, that would make a difference?” she demanded. “If it saves lives or takes even one step toward cleaning up the colossal mess you’ve made of the world, well, fuck that, but if it’s for you, only you, then you’d consider it?”

His eyes faded, flickered and burned out savagely bright. “You twist my meaning.”

“The hell I do! You want me! I know you want me! What is all this pointless horseshit about, all the reading and napkins and that, if not for keeping me? Why muck around with seeds and…and bloody blankets for a month at a go, when I can be forever for you?”

“Forever. What do you know of forever?” he asked with undisguised contempt. “What do you know of death?”

He was baiting her to evade the question. Funny, how she could recognize that and still jump right up and bite.

“I’ve seen death my whole life, thanks to you!”

He laughed at her, if that harsh slap of sound could be called a laugh. “Seeing is not understanding, child.”

“Yeah? Well, at least I have seen it. I didn’t throw it out there in the world and then lock myself up where I never had to look at it again, unless it was pretty. I had to see what death looks like when it’s rotting on its feet. I had to smell it burning. I had to hear it eating!” she shouted. “You know what I’ve never seen? I’ve never seen it lie down and bloody die! And if that means I don’t really understand what death is, then it’s your fault!”

“Would you?” he inquired. The very quiet of his tone should have been a warning. “Would you understand death better? Would you know the value of the bauble you offer me? This trinket, imperfect and tarnished though it be, whose worth you still hold equal to all the hungering dead of this Earth?”

“I still mean it, if that’s what you’re asking,” Lan shot back. “I’m not afraid of you!”

He held out his hand, silent.

She looked at it, realized she was hesitating, and threw back her shielding blankets. Naked in his eyelight, she went to him. She took the hand he offered, kissed it again, defiantly, and brought it to her neck.

“Breathe,” he told her, taking firm hold of her throat. He inhaled to show her how, silver rings tinkled merrily as his broad chest expanded, then exhaled just as deeply, nodding as she obeyed. “Again,” he said, and, “Again,” and, “Once more,” and when she had breathed out all there was, his hand abruptly tightened.

She knew it would. Why then, did she flinch back, her hands flying up to grip uselessly at his immoveable arm? Why did it take so long—a second at least, maybe two or even three—to notice that she was still breathing? Not as deeply or as easily, but breathing all the same.

“You said you were ready,” Azrael said with a clear note of disapproval.

“I am.”

“You don’t appear to be certain.”

“I am!”

“Then hush now. We have limited time. Gentle asphyxiation—and I am gentle, Lan. I’ll not let you fall before your time—renders one unconscious in less than a minute, if you fight. So be still. Remember you are not afraid.”

And then there was no air. There was no sense of choking, no sense even of a fight. There simply was no air. Her mouth worked, chewing uselessly on nothing. Her chest heaved, but there was nothing for her lungs to pull against. Her hands slapped and slid along his arms as he spun her around and slammed her back against the door, knocking the last cough out of her with nothing, nothing to replace it.

Panic took her in spite of her best intentions, but after the first few seconds, she could barely lift her arms to push at his, barely move her legs to kick.

“They’re getting heavy, aren’t they?” he remarked, watching her. “With all the death you’ve seen, you’ve never guessed at the weight death has when it first creeps in. And that is your first lesson, child. Death is not something you see. Or smell. Or hear. Death is personal, intimate. Death knows you from the inside out. Feel, then, your lungs growing denser with every breath you cannot take. Your heart, heavy as it races and heavier still as it begins to slow. Soon, it will stop.”

Her flagging struggles renewed, but only for a moment, and they left her hanging even weaker than before.

“Hush,” he said again, softly, like a lover. “You are not afraid. You are Lan of Norwood, who walked alone into my world of hungering dead, and you are not afraid. Yes, your heart will stop and when it does, you will hear it. You will feel it. It will hurt, but you are prepared for this. You think that will be the end, that death will follow shortly.” He leaned close, filling her sight with his eyes and the terrible color that hid behind their blinding light. “It. Won’t.”

Her nerve, such as it was, broke. It was over. She was done and later, she would be humiliated, but right now, she wanted air. She shook her head, not in denial, but as a horse will when it fights the bit. She hit the door, not just once but over and over. There was blood in her mouth, blood she could neither swallow nor spit out. The taste of it filled her skull, like the sound of her head beating on the door and her heart beating on her ribs.

“I’ve heard it said one’s entire life is replayed in these last moments,” Azrael mused, slipping his left hand behind her head to keep her from battering herself unconscious. “I’ve never found it so, but there is time enough, isn’t there? There is no beauty in that final night, no flights of angels come to comfort you, no welcoming light to guide your way, but there is…oh, so much time. Your senses may recede, your eyes go blind and your ears deaf, but you will feel and you will go on feeling for what will seem to be hours. Your bowels will empty and you will lie powerless in your spilled shit while your body, your meat, begins the processes of decay and every nerve screams and still it does not end and will not until your stubborn brain’s last cell sparks and fails.”

His face swam out of focus—was she crying? Were those tears?—and the shadows crept in to conceal him. Only his eyes remained, growing larger and brighter until they joined together into a deep tunnel of white light, just like some folk said there was, but even as she watched, their perfect brilliance broke apart behind a thousand tiny dots of darkness, and it was the darkness that took her in.

Through the pain and the fear and the panic, came peace. It fell over her, soft as a blanket, warm as her mother’s hand reaching down out of some forgotten night to cup her face and tell her she was safe now, safe, and could sleep.

And then Azrael came—not the angel or the devil, but the whole of him, unmasked, eternal. He shattered the darkness, supplanted it, became it. She felt him close with exquisite clarity on her and in her and all around her, ripping her out of that half-grasped promise of rest and filling it instead with his own infinite and awful reality. Her life was there and her death and between them, her soul, caught on the points of his claws.

Stillness. Not silence. The air itself had a sound that was almost her name, deafening and inaudible. Every hair on her body spiked outward, making her skin hum with an almost electric charge. Her nipples tightened painfully. Her womb cramped. The ache of her airless lungs was still there, the way the stars were still there when the sun came up, utterly eclipsed by a much greater light. She was a body made of a million nerves and no thought, no awareness of any world beyond him.

“This is death, you ignorant child,” his voice roared, no longer on her ears but in her head, her bones. “This is what you cast before me like so many shiny beads or bottled water to buy my will. This is death and you do fear it, don’t you? You fear it and you are right to fear it, for where it ends, I begin!”

His hand opened. Air drove into her, solid as flesh, scraping her throat as it invaded, pumping color and sound and sensation into the muffling black that almost had her and was still reluctant to let go. She collapsed, scratching futilely at the door as she fought to stay upright and ending up on the floor anyway, her bare legs sprawled at broken angles and her hot cheek pressed to the rough stone, rocking slightly with the force of breathing, just breathing.

“No, it is not gentle, is it, to be saved?” he murmured, far above her. “But then, no one comes through that veil save that they are torn. And when it is done, I shall have these tatters to mend together into your eternal form. Hm.” He began to walk around her where she lay, circling slowly, inspecting every twitch and shudder with an assessing eye. “You say you wish to be raised up as you are, with all your mind and memory intact? So be it, but you will find memory is not a comfort to the dead. Every new day will bring you a thousand fresh reminders of how diminished your days have become. You will cut your hair and it will never grow again. You’ll never be hungry, but you may eat out of habit, only to find even lemon cake turns sour when it rots in your stomach. So you’ll stop, except on those rare occasions when you find yourself wondering what it tasted like and why you ever wanted it at all. Because you’ll forget, Lan. I can make you over in my image, but I can never make you as I am. Your flesh may be preserved as it was at the hour of your death, but your mind will remain mortal. Year by year, the hard edges that separate then from now will wear soft away and you’ll wonder…were they peaches I picked, or apples? Were there ever really Eaters or were they only monsters from a dream I had once, when I used to dream? In time, you will forget how it felt to be alive and remember only that you were…until I took it from you. And you will hate me.”

Lan choked on nothing, retched nothing, and lay hoarsely gasping.

“Or I can take those memories. End them, as you would say. I could dip my hand into your death and pull you free of it, newborn and wondering, yet give you all your will.” He passed through her line of sight, paused briefly as if to give her a chance to speak, then kept on walking when she didn’t. He wore a gold ring on his toe, one she’d never before noticed. It tapped at the stone with every step, not quite keeping time with her gasping breaths. “You will know that you are Lan, but only because I tell you so. You will know the tale of how one small child lost her coat on England’s shores, as I tell it to you, but you will not know her face or her name. Every mark upon your body shall become an incomplete clue to a life you have lost. You will question me, doubt me and, eventually, you will hate me.”

Lan coughed and dragged her leaden arm up through fathoms of tar to grip her swollen throat.

“So I will deny you all. I will take this cooling clay and shape it as I please. The creature I form will never know pain or grief or loss. Neither will she miss her life nor have cause to question it. She will never be the woman I knew and I suspect I shall tire of her readily, but she will love me…and she will always love me.”

He completed his circle and hunkered down in front of her.  “But here is the vital point you have overlooked. However it happens, whatever I make of you, I need not bargain for it. Death will come for you in its own time and when it does, I will be there to guide you through. I can wait. And if I find myself impatient, I can take what I desire without bartering for it. Haven is mine. All who reside within are mine. You, Lan, are mine.” His hand came out of nothing to lift her heavy hair, rub it between his fingers, and let it drop again. “Chamberlain!”

The door eased itself open, just bumping Lan’s foot. “My lord?”

Azrael rose and stepped over her. “My chamber needs airing. I want fresh linens for the bed and fresh company to fill it. Millicent or Hestia, perhaps. I am not particular to flavor, provided it is sweet.”

“Yes, my lord. And…ah…?”

“Fetch her handmaiden to clean her up and take her back to her room,” Azrael said, catching Lan by the ankle and pulling her around so that he could open the door wide enough to pass through. “I am done with her.”

The door banged shut and Lan was alone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

She couldn’t be angry forever. She couldn’t even be angry all night, although she tried. When Serafina came in the morning to dress her for breakfast, Lan’s refusal had more to do with embarrassment than any lingering bitterness. She didn’t want to face Azrael. More than that, she didn’t want to swallow the cold lump of her pride and go, only to see some other dolly in her chair. Serafina stood there at least an hour with her morning dress in her arms, alternately berating and wheedling with her, but eventually gave up in disgust and left her alone.

The next time the door opened, it was a servant with a breakfast tray and not, as Lan anticipated, guards come to drag her to the dining hall. Lan waited for her to leave before she got up to investigate. There was no note, but the tray itself was polished silver, smooth and shiny enough that Lan could see the deep purple blots in the shape of Azrael’s fingers smudging her throat. She stared at them for a long time before wrapping herself in a blanket and making sure she was swaddled up to her chin. She meant to leave the food untouched, but it wasn’t long before she broke and had the coffee at least. It hurt to swallow.

It was a long day, made infinitely longer by having nothing to do except wait for Serafina’s inevitable return. It never happened. A dinner tray came instead. Still no note. She ate the bread and some of the fruit and put the rest of it out on the landing where the smell couldn’t get to her. She curled up small and cold on the floor under the thin, blood-colored blanket and thought.

She should leave. Right now, even without food or water or a weapon. She didn’t know where the nearest waystation was and didn’t care. She would just start walking. Maybe the Eaters would get her or maybe a ferry would happen by and pick her up. Either outcome was better than staying here.

So she told herself, but she didn’t move. She thought her black thoughts and nursed that last hot coal in her heart and replayed ten thousand variations of her last exchange with Azrael, but the one thing she did not do was march herself downstairs and out the front gate. It was not hope that restrained her, either, but the quiet fact that, no matter how many times she said she was not afraid to die, she was. Haven was locked in the ruins of the old world, where Eaters were sure to be drawn by its glowing lights and illusion of life. They would be on her before she was a mile gone from Haven’s gate. She would scream then, oh yes. And eventually, she would rise and walk.

A hero’s death, maybe, but still a pointless one. Azrael never left the palace. He would never even see the Eater she had become and even if he did, there was no reason to think he would do anything but wave his hand and let her rot where she fell. If he thought of her at all after that, it would only be as a moment’s fond recall while his new dolly wore her old dresses and endured his loathsome touch.

These thoughts—the last in particular—turned like a wheel through her head. Not a cart or bicycle wheel either. That kind of turning would at least move her forward. This was more like a miller’s wheel, turning in place, grinding the same simple stuff into finer and finer powder, but going nowhere.

She slept badly that night, but she did sleep.

Morning came with wind and rain, blowing in through the glassless window to wet Lan’s pillow, which was already wet. Lan wriggled around to the other side of the small room, as far from the weather as she could get, and waited for Serafina, but her handmaiden never came. A servant brought breakfast and a clean dress, setting both on the vanity and leaving again without a word. There was no note and none again when her dinner was brought that night.

Lan sat with her supper for what felt like a very long time, staring out the window at a sun that hardly seemed to move at all. Slowly, she began to eat. She used her fork and her napkin. When the tray was empty, she set it out on the landing. She lay down on the bed instead of under it and closed her eyes.

She woke in a small puddle of rainwater, which set the tone for the day that followed. And the night that followed that. And so it went for who knew how long, each day dragging on a little longer and each night leaving a little more darkness behind, until they all blended together into one long, bruise-colored space in which Lan sat in her tower, alone.

On the morning that her neck was finally clear (or at least, on the morning that she noticed, since she’d lost count of the days themselves and wasn’t sure anymore whether she was still looking each and every day), Lan left. She passed the servant bringing her morning tray on the stair, but although the dead woman looked startled, she did not attempt to call Lan back. Neither did the pikeman standing watch at the door below. No one spoke to her at all as she walked the wide corridors leading to the dining hall. There, she stood for some time while Azrael’s steward impatiently waited with one hand on the door for her to decide to go in so he could announce her.

She could hear the rattle and clink of dishes, polite laughter, light music. She could smell sausages and spice…and coffee. No one here drank coffee for breakfast. No one but her. Still, she lingered and in the end, she turned around. Azrael’s steward immediately went in, probably to drop a whisper in the lordly ear. Lan walked away a little faster, but no one followed.

She didn’t want to go back to her room and she didn’t know where else to go, so she went to the library. It was empty and dark when she got there, but it wasn’t long before Master Wickham arrived. He did not comment on her lengthy absence, merely gave her his usual greeting and opened up his briefcase. She tried to study, or at least, she tried to try, but she was restless and withdrawn and spent most of the day staring out the window with her primer in her lap. Master Wickham doggedly lectured what might as well have been an empty chair, but eventually retired to a chair by the fireplace and read until the servants brought tea.

He waited without bothering her or even seeming to watch her while she made a single biscuit last half an hour, then closed his book with a dull clap of sound and set it firmly aside. “Let’s chat,” he said. His voice was as pleasant as ever. All the same, it was not a request and he didn’t wait for an answer before he followed up with, “I’m a creature of routine, Lan, and I find disruption to that routine to be extremely upsetting. Extremely. Now—” He raised a finger to forestall a flurry of apologies or explanations Lan had not been about to make. “—I don’t expect you to feel the same way, but I do ask that you refrain from deliberately exacerbating an already unpleasant situation.”

Lan blinked a few times in the expectant silence that followed and finally said, “Okay?”

“What happened?”

Lan found something inside her coffee cup to stare at. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. I want to help you, Lan. Our lord rather shortsightedly raised me with the overdriving urge to see my students succeed, whoever that student might be, so I don’t have much of a choice, but however it happened, I sincerely want to help you. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

Master Wickham sighed and opened his book again, but he hadn’t even turned one page before he shut it and set it forcefully aside. “I cannot function under these circumstances. You are dismissed. I’ll ask our lord to release you from our lessons.”

“No! Don’t…Don’t do that.” She pushed her mostly untouched cup aside and dragged her primer back in front of her. “We had a fight.”

His brows climbed and slowly knit, from surprise to bewilderment. “Are you sure?”

“What kind of question is that?”

He glanced around, as if to judge the veracity of his next words before he said, cautiously, “You’re still here.”

“It wasn’t that kind of fight. Nobody…” Lan scratched a few lines in her book, realized she was drawing his horned mask, and blacked it out. “Nobody killed anyone or anything. He just…said a few things.”

Master Wickham gave that a lot more time than Lan would have thought it needed before saying, “He did.”

Lan shrugged.

“What sort of things?”

“None of your business.”

“Fair enough,” he said after a moment. “Have you apologized?”

“I don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she insisted, “and if he wants to get his knickers in a knot over nothing, he can do it by himself.”

“Lan—”

“Look, mate, he doesn’t want to see me right now and I sure as hell don’t want to see him, so we’re giving it a breather. Okay? Okay.” She found a clean page in her primer, hoping he’d take the hint.

He did get up and come over to her table, taking the chair opposite her just like he usually did when they were working on her writing, but instead of starting in with the lesson, he took the primer from her and closed it. “No,” he said seriously. “This is not okay. It’s even less okay that you seem to think it is.” And before she could point out that it was a fight and fights weren’t supposed to be okay in the strictest sense of the word, but that no one had gotten hit or, hell, even yelled at much, so for fuck’s sake calm down about it, he asked, “Why did you come to Haven?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Humor me.”

“I came to ask Azrael to stop raising Eaters.”

“Have you?”

“Huh?”

“Have you asked him yet?”

“Yeah, but he…oh.” Lan rolled her eyes. “You and your words. Fine, I came to convince him to stop.”

He nodded once, but his solemn, frowning expression never changed. “How do you intend to do that if you don’t bother to endear yourself to him?”

“I’ve been endearing him every night for over a month!” Lan snapped. “And for crying out loud, just say fucking, why don’t you? I’m fucking him. It’s called barter and you may not approve, but it’s how the world works.”

“My feelings are irrelevant,” he said with a cut of one hand. “As are the workings of the world beyond Haven. As for barter, you perhaps fail to take into consideration that it is only effective when the value of what one wishes to possess is greater than what one already has. You cannot expect our lord to relinquish his most potent defense against a proven treacherous enemy merely for a warm body in his bed.”

Let alone a cold one.

Lan’s hand twitched, wanting to rise and test her throat, where she knew there were no bruises. She pushed it down again, hard, and said, “Have you ever slept with him?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Not to my knowledge.”

“Then what gives you the idea you can lecture me on how it’s done? I am a whole lot more than just a warm body, not that it’s any of your business. I know what I’m doing and he likes how I do it just fine.”

“And you think that’s enough, do you?” Master Wickham watched her ignore him for a moment, then sat back and laced his hands over one bent knee. “Right,” he said briskly. “Convince me.”

“Huh?”

“Convince me to put an end to the hungering dead. Assuming sex is not the sum and substance of your persuasive powers, convince me.”

Lan frowned.

“I’m quite serious,” said Master Wickham. “I am, like all our lord’s risen, a reflection of the mood that had him when I was raised. My thoughts are, to no small degree, our lord’s own, although I very much doubt he is as forthcoming as I in expressing them. To put it even more succinctly,” he said in his ‘let’s chat’ tone, “if you can’t convince me, you will never convince him, so have a go.”

“Just the fact that I need to convince you that eating people is wrong means there is no point in having this conversation, so no.” Lan turned back to the window, fumed for maybe half a minute, then swung back to him. “Seriously, how can you defend that? How can you sit here in a palace, with your stupid shiny shoes and your stupid briefcase full of books, and talk about the Eaters like you know anything at all about them? Have you even seen one?”

“Yes.”

“Eating?” she pressed.

He did not flinch. “Yes.”

“Then what the fuck is left for me to say?” Again, she tried to stare down the long-faced lady in the window and again she turned back to find him still calmly waiting for her next words. “You don’t really think they’re people, do you?” she demanded. “That killing them is, what? Murder?”

“I have no special fondness for them, but I am content to co-exist.”

“Because you can! You can walk right out in the middle of them and they’ll never even look your way! How would you feel about it if they ate you?”

“Not very charitably, I imagine,” he admitted. “But I can’t deny they serve a purpose. So long as that necessity exists, so too should our lord’s hungering dead.”

“And by necessity, you mean as long as there are humans.”

“I am human,” said Master Wickham with just a touch of frost. “Death did not unmake my humanity. I think. I feel. I speak and reason. Just because I do not breathe or eat does not make me less than I was.”

“Obviously I didn’t mean it like that!”

“No? Then let me put to you a question. If you get your way and the choice were yours, would you allow the dead to remain in Haven?”

Lan blinked and squinted at him, but he refused to explain. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“While the rest of the living, of humanity, continue to squat in the mud behind their walls?” he pressed. “You would be content with that? You would be content to leave and live among them?”

“How many buildings in Haven are empty?” she countered. “There’s not a hell of a lot of us left. Couldn’t we all fit in Haven? Couldn’t we build on if we can’t?”

“So you are in fact proposing to move yourselves in,” said Master Wickham. “To simply take Haven from us because it appears to you that there is room. And if you decide our homes are more comfortable than those laying empty, why, just take them! After all, we’re dead. And when you propose to set the rights of the living above the rights of the dead—”

“Okay, let’s get one thing straight,” interrupted Lan. “The living built Haven. Every building, every road. We strung the lights up, we put in the plumbing, we painted the bloody paintings and hung them on the bloody walls. I never said anything about taking your homes away, but if anyone’s got the right to protest being pushed out, it’s us.”

“Then you consider us usurpers and still you insist you and all your kind would share what you say we have stolen. No,” he said, even as Lan opened her mouth to damn well protest. “I withdraw that remark. That our lord conquered Haven is incontrovertible. Conquest is, of course, the means by which most empires are founded, including that one whose ruins we inhabit…but that is neither here nor there. You say there is room in Haven for the living and the dead, and if the matter were as simple as fitting physical entities into available space, I would have to agree, but it isn’t. You say you only want the Eaters gone. Anyone can see they’re not alive, not—how did you put it?—not people, and what could possibly be the harm? Well, I’m not alive either, so you’ll have to pardon me if I’m not keen to use that as the tipping point between who is or isn’t ‘people’.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, damn it! You know I didn’t!”

He raised an eyebrow and slightly bent his neck, looking at her over the rims of non-existent spectacles. “Do I?”

Lan’s frustration bubbled over at last into real anger. “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you want me to say and you know what? I don’t care! You just want to score points off me in a stupid word-game while out there, in the real world, real people are really dying! That’s what I care about! That’s why I’m here!”

“If that’s true…” He leaned slightly forward and deliberately cocked his head to an inquiring angle. “Why are you here?”

“Why am I…? What?”

“Here,” he repeated. “With all that is at stake, why are you in the library, of all places, rather than apologizing to—”

“Oh fuck that!” Lan exploded. “If he wants me, he knows where to find me, and whatever he wants me to say when that happens, I’ll say it, but I’m not crawling back just to give his ego a stroke. I may be his dolly, but I’m not his fucking dog, so there!”

“So there,” he agreed and stood. “Take a walk with me.”

It was not a request, no more than it had been a chat.

Lan followed him out from the library, through corridors and breezeways, upstairs and across foyers until they began to see not merely pikemen at their posts or on patrol, but just leaned up against the wall like anyone chatting with their mates. There were watchmen, in and out of uniform, and even Revenants, although they kept to their own kind and never seemed entirely at ease. There were no servants here; if there was work being done, it was done by dead men and women in uniforms. Somewhere along the way, unnoticed, the usual decorative touches had also vanished, replaced by racks of scythes and swords and occasionally even gun cabinets, where rifles were kept in good working order against the next time they were needed to turn dissenters into Eaters.

“Where are we?” Lan asked, although she hardly needed to.

“The garrison. Just for a moment. Wait here.” Master Wickham left Lan at a window and went ahead to a plain set of doors, where he had a word with the Revenants stiffly at ease in front of them. One of the Revenants withdrew and returned in short order with Deimos. He listened to whatever Master Wickham had to say, looked once at Lan, then made a brief answer and went back inside.

“Is that it?” Lan asked as Master Wickham joined her.

“Not quite. This way.” He smiled at her and extended a hand toward another hall, just as Deimos came back through the door, now with a small leather satchel slung over one shoulder.

“Is he coming with us?” Lan asked uneasily.

“Yes. Come along.”

She didn’t move. “What’s this about?”

“I’m your teacher, Lan. Consider it a lesson.”

“What if I say no?”

“Say no,” Master Wickham invited as Deimos put a hand on the hilt of his sword. “We’ll find out together.”

She started walking.

More halls. More doors. They ended up outside, across the rain-grey courtyard, past the iron gate and on the long road that led away from the palace. It was an hour’s walk to reach the city, maybe two, and still they kept walking, making their way steadily down the empty streets of Haven. Lan could see the wall ahead of them now and it was only getting bigger.

There were stairs at even intervals along the wall and Master Wickham went up the first they reached, with Lan behind him and Deimos behind her. On the top of the wall, the wind seemed stronger. And colder. There were watchmen and even Revenants standing guard up here, not many, but more than enough to keep a lookout on all the nothing there was to see on the other side. The city used to be bigger, before it was Haven, but Azrael had knocked everything down that he didn’t want. There were no forests growing back, not even weeds, nothing living at all, only scorched earth and broken concrete, twisted metal and weathered bones…and Eaters.

Deimos moved away to speak with his men and Master Wickham went with him, but Lan stayed behind, watching the Eaters below her. They staggered along the foot of the wall, or crawled, if their legs had rotted out from under them, drawn here, even here, either by the electric lights that burned at night or by the sounds and smells of Azrael’s livestock. They were slow now and relatively quiet with nothing to hunt, but even as she watched them, a rat darted out from a clump of debris and every Eater in sight of it suddenly lunged. Those with voices bayed; most could only make that wet, farting sound of air passing through meat. The rat vanished down a hole, but that wasn’t the end of it. The Eaters, now a swarm of a dozen or so, began to dig, tumbling broken rock and debris aside with single-minded purpose until one of them leapt up, eating, and the others converged on it, all grasping hands and snapping jaws and bright smears of fresh blood.

Lan shut her eyes tight and turned her face into the wind before she opened them again. One of the watchmen was pointing out into the wastes. Deimos scanned the horizon, then opened his satchel and brought out a pair of binoculars. He passed them to Master Wickham, who trained them on some dark dots in the far, far distance and then lowered them and beckoned to Lan.

She didn’t know what she was going to see when she raised them to her eyes, but she already knew she didn’t want to see it. Trying to brace herself, she looked, tapping away the distance and bringing the blurs slowly into focus.

A ferry. Not moving, just idling there. By habit, she shifted her attention first to the picture on the side. A black-haired beauty in a barely-there winding cloth and a scythe, ravens in flight around her and a horde of decapitated corpses below. It wasn’t one she knew, but then, it wouldn’t be, not this far south. There were letters, but they were too far away to make out. The ferryman was no more than a pale blob behind the wheel, with a little movement now and then to suggest he might be talking. His passenger had crawled out through the hatch and was hunkered on the ferry’s roof, long hair blowing in the wind and her hands oddly cupped around her face. She had her own binoculars, Lan realized, and was looking back at them. Maybe not at them specifically, but at Haven.

“Who are they?” Lan asked stupidly.

“Spies. Beggars. Rebels. What matter what they call themselves?” Deimos took his binoculars back and had a look through them. “The living have always come to Haven. We see fewer than we used to, but they still come. That one’s been circling for days. Now she’s letting herself be seen. She wants us to send a vanguard out to meet them, so she won’t have to come any closer on foot.” He glanced down, pointedly, at the Eaters who were once more slumping listlessly around the base of the wall, rat-blood drying on their rotting flesh and drool shining on their ragged mouths, then went back to watching the ferry. “So far as I’m concerned, she can stay out there. Our lord does not allow us to kill the living on sight, but that doesn’t mean I have to give them welcome.”

“If she’s clever and lucky enough to make it as far as the gate, she’ll be taken into custody,” Master Wickham said, standing close beside her and gazing, not out into the wastes, but inward at the many roofs and dark windows of Haven. “The gatewatch will inform our lord, who is not in the habit of admitting guests, but who is just as unlikely to turn her out sight unseen.”

Lan felt a tightening in her gut that meant absolutely nothing. She lifted her chin. “So?”

Deimos grunted and turned around, leaning slightly closer to Master Wickham to say, “You’re wasting your breath,” as he resumed his watch over the distant ferry.

“Ah well,” Master Wickham replied with a hint of humor. “I’m not using it for anything these days. Lan, why do you think I brought you here?”

She shrugged defiantly. “To scare me, I reckon.”

“Scare you?”

“And it won’t work. I already know I’m replaceable. He tells me all the time.”

“And yet, you don’t appear to listen.”

“They never do,” Deimos remarked.

“I am, for the moment, still your teacher, Lan,” said Master Wickham, assuming his lecturing pose. “So allow me to lay out a few I should think obvious lessons. What you choose to take away from them is entirely up to you. Are you listening?”

“Yeah,” Lan said sourly, but she wasn’t, not really. She was watching the Eaters, who had all come together at the base of the wall almost directly below her, drawn either by her smell or her heat or just some unseen life-light she shone out like a beacon. There they stood, leaning up against one another for balance, arms hooked around strange necks and chins resting on strange shoulders, licking blood off other Eater’s lips with the casual intimacy of the dead. “Yeah, I’m listening.”

“First, this land is filled with desperate people who would do anything to be in your position. Second, most of those people…what is the phrase I want?” he asked Deimos.

“Keep it simple,” the Revenant replied, watching the Eaters stagger around the foot of the wall. “She’s American.”

“I am not!”

One of the Eaters raised its head at the sound of her voice and looked around, teeth clacking in anticipatory chewing motions, but it didn’t think to look up and soon lost interest.

“Most of those people don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about the hungering dead,” Master Wickham concluded after a moment spent perusing some mental book of American idioms. “And that should concern you, Lan, deeply. You want our lord to take back one of his most potent defenses, essentially opening himself to an aggressive renewal of the war you claim to be trying to end. But that woman—” He pointed out into the wastes at the dot on the horizon. “—may want nothing more than a full belly and a safe place to sleep. That woman may not only tolerate a doctor’s examination, but be grateful to have one. She may even want an education,” he added with very mild reproach.

“Takes all kinds, I guess,” Lan said, refusing to drop her eyes or her chin.

Deimos shook his head in silence, but Master Wickham was undaunted.

“Indeed. And since all kinds eventually present themselves to him, the longer you spend sulking in your room, the sooner your appallingly unsubtle loathing for the gowns he’s given you will be resolved by having some other woman wear them.”

“I wasn’t sulking, damn it!”

She hadn’t meant to shout, but she sure hadn’t been trying to be quiet. The same Eater that had looked around before now did it again, and this time, it looked up. Its left eye was mostly gone—just a shriveled, brownish-green sac stuck to the bottom of its socket—but the right was still working. It saw her and leapt, crashing into the wall and breaking its withered fingers as it clawed in vain for a handhold. Then it was gone, lost in a tumble of grasping hands and snapping jaws, all of them climbing and being climbed by other Eaters until the weakest were crushed and brokenly writhing at the bottom of the death-pile and the strongest was pulling itself up over the ramparts.

She was in no danger. Lan knew that. She wasn’t afraid and she certainly wasn’t paralyzed. The only reason she stood there, silent, unmoving, was because she knew Deimos would step up the way he did and shear the Eater’s hands off. It fell back, biting at the air in desperation, and was swallowed up by the howling, thrashing, grasping knot below. The hands clung on, weakly jittering, until Deimos stepped up to kick them loose. His boots were black and shiny, unreal against the weathered bricks of the wall. She raised her eyes, unafraid, unaffected, to look at him and said, “How often do you clean your boots?”

Deimos glanced at Master Wickham, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. He said, “Every night.”

“They look really good,” Lan said and immediately felt dizzy, like she might sick up or fall over. Right over the wall. Right on top of the Eaters. “I want to go now. Okay? Right now.” She turned around, but there was a Revenant standing between her and the stairs.

“Lan,” said Master Wickham.

“He sent me away!” she shouted, turning on him. “This wasn’t my idea! He said he was done with me!”

“And are you done with him?”

The wind again, burning her cheeks and her eyes. “I’ve been with him practically every night since I got here! Did you think that was going to last forever?”

“Oh, I know it won’t,” he replied seriously. “But for all your shouting, I don’t believe you’ve quite grasped that concept yourself or its consequences. You seem to think you ‘get’ to stay in Haven as long as you wish, simply because you wish it. You think you are owed audiences, even when your arguments consist mainly of insults and profanities, which our lord is obligated to forgive simply because it was you who made them. And that sex is all you need to provide him, whenever it conveniences you to do so.”

“He set the terms!” she insisted. “It’s all he wants!”

“That may well be true. I personally don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll grant the supposition. The fact remains, he doesn’t have to get it from you, whereas no one else in this wide world can give you what you want, and there, Lan, there lies the burden of apology. This is where you’ll tell me again how you have nothing to apologize for,” he went on as Lan opened her mouth to say just that. “And how he said or did this or that and you have the moral high ground. I don’t care. I suspect I wouldn’t care even if I had the capacity. The reality of your situation is, you have less to offer and more to lose, and therefore, you will apologize.”

The wind blew hard against her face, chapping her cheeks and making them burn. “It’s not that simple.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” Master Wickham pinched at the bridge of his nose and turned to Deimos. “Do you want to try?”

The Revenant cocked an eyebrow at him. “I don’t want her to stay.”

“Please.”

“Please yourself. I know what you’re trying to do, but I don’t agree with it. You were made to care for your students, but I was made to protect Haven, and she—” He paused, then turned on Lan herself. “You. You represent a direct threat to this city,” he told her, advancing with one gloved hand on the hilt of his sword and the other drawn into a fist. “If I had even a sliver of doubt that our lord wants you with him, I would put you right over this wall myself. No other warmblood woman has ever had this power over him, ever. You are an infection upon his thoughts and his judgment and with every day that passes, your corruption spreads. If he takes back his hungering dead for you, the living will come. Everything he has built may be destroyed. Ten thousand of his people have made a home here, raised with love to serve him for all eternity, but he will put them all at risk for you.”

Lan could not answer. She could barely seem to breathe.

“Thank you, Captain,” said Master Wickham, smiling.

Deimos looked at him, his brows furrowed. “For what?”

“He sent me away,” Lan said again. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the Eaters, which strained it, making it seem as though it cracked. “He said he was done and he meant it. He doesn’t want me back.”

“Please don’t be stupid,” Master Wickham said, looking pained. “You’ve no idea how much that annoys a dead educator. If he was, as you say, ‘done’ with you, you would know it. You are not so formidable that our deathless lord fears to confront you, nor remove you, should that become necessary. And I tell you now, it may, if you continue to make yourself his adversary.”

“I…” Lan looked from one to the other of them, then down at the Eaters, her breath a hot knot in her chest. “He could have sent for me, if he wanted me back. I would have gone.”

“Could have and would have, weighed together, measure precisely nothing. What did you do yesterday?”

“Huh?”

“Yesterday,” he said, patiently. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know. I ate. I slept.” She looked at Deimos, who was no help at all, and did her best to hide her confusion with a shrug. “I did a lot of looking out the window. There’s not a hell of a lot to do in that tower.”

Master Wickham acknowledged that with a polite nod and said, “Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth it?” she asked stubbornly, knowing she was about to get a lecture on the pointlessness of spite.

But he didn’t. He said instead, speaking pleasantly and enunciating so she couldn’t miss a word, “You traded a day of your life for a little food, a few hours’ sleep, and the view from that window. You will never have that day back. You have no guarantee you will ever have another. You would have returned to him if he’d sent for you, but he didn’t, so you did nothing and now that day is over. That day is gone. So. Was it worth it?”

She didn’t have an answer. He didn’t seem to be expecting one.

“You have to want the time you have, Lan,” he said, not unkindly. “More than anything. More than everything. Because that is the cost at which you are selling it. Do you understand?”

Still she could only stand there, silent, while the wind whipped at her eyes.

“Good.” Master Wickham tugged his sleeve back to check the time on his wristwatch, then turned a broad smile on Deimos. “Thank you for your help, Captain. I’d like to take her back now. You needn’t trouble yourself to accompany us if you’d rather stay.”

Deimos glanced out into the wastes, then gave Lan a hard stare. “Behave yourself,” he told her. “I have standing orders to prevent your escape. If you attempt to leave Haven, I have our lord’s authority to hunt you down and do whatever is necessary to have you back.”

Her chest tightened, but not with fear.

Signaling the Revenant at the stair, Deimos resumed his watch over the distant ferry as Master Wickham led her away, keeping a weather eye on the next woman who might conceivably fall into his lord’s favor.

The way back was so much longer than the way to the wall had been. She walked with her head down and her back to the Eaters and the dark dot of a woman who was maybe coming, watching her shadow grow fainter over the cracked pavement as the whole world seemed to darken. The clouds were thickening, but only over Haven, reminding her of the black rains Azrael was said to summon at a whim. She’d believed it once, as she’d believed he could wave his arm and send out plagues or wither crops or start fires. She wished she could still believe it, because it was, in its way, a comforting thought. How much easier this would all be, if only everything were his fault.

Lan wasn’t sure just when she started crying, but Master Wickham was kind enough to let her do it without an embarrassing show of concern. He studied the buildings as they passed them, admiring cornices and casements and waiting until she’d wrung herself dry. Then he said, “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Unacceptable.”

“I don’t! You think I planned all this? You think I’m doing it on purpose? Everything I say is the wrong thing! Everything I do just makes it worse!”

“Do you remember what life is, Lan?”

She didn’t, not right away. He had to pick up one foot and hold it off the ground—an incomplete step—before she remembered. “Motion?”

“Motion,” he agreed. “Never forget that. There are no side-steps. There is no waiting. You are moving even as we speak, so you need to decide what it is you really want and how much you’re really willing to give up to achieve it, because everything you do and say, every decision that you make, can only bring you closer to your goal or further from it. We’re going to go right past Westminster Cathedral,” he concluded without a pause, but with a stark tone of regret. “Religious iconography was never a fancy of mine, but Westminster has the most beautiful mosaics in Haven.”

Lan sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “Want to stop in and look at it?”

“We haven’t time, I’m sure.”

“I’m supposed to be in lessons until six, aren’t I? It can’t even be half-noon yet.”

“Well…” He checked the sun’s position and sent her a probing glance. “A few minutes couldn’t hurt. An hour, at most. Would you mind dreadfully?”

The thought of standing about in the street while Master Wickham gawped at a bunch of mouldy old tiles for an hour was a deeply depressing one, but still better than facing Azrael. “Sounds fun,” she said dully. “I love old pubs.”

“It’s a cathedral, actually.”

“What’s the difference? Let’s just go.”

* * *

Once again, the dead man’s enthusiasm for poking around an admittedly pretty damned amazing building eclipsed his sense of time and the one hour he’d promised not to exceed passed and was buried under at least six more. The gathering clouds she’d seen from the wall had held off all this time, but now opened up with a vengeance, shrouding the city in thick mist and eye-stinging rain. The electric lamps that lined the streets were no match for English weather and in the gloom, even Master Wickham got turned around once.

By the time they arrived back at the palace, it was full dark and Lan’s clothes had soaked up easily ten thousand liters of stormwater. All she wanted at that point was to climb the million steps to her room and fall asleep in the rain-damp bed waiting for her, but the pikemen standing watch at the palace doors held her in the cold foyer, dripping whole oceans over that fine floor to the visible consternation of every servant who scuttled in and out about his or her nightly chores.

Master Wickham stayed with her throughout the long minutes that followed, although she told him twice there was no need. No one told her what she was waiting for. No one had to.

At last, she heard the sound she had been listening for and dreading—the long stride of a bootless foot, accompanied on every step by the rattle of metal plates and rings and all the other jeweled things he wore. Azrael.

She was watching the corridor that led to the dining hall, but sounds echoed oddly in the foyer and he appeared unexpectedly on the second floor. And he was not alone.

The red-haired dolly who was with him was so pretty, she might have been dead, except for the movement of breath that caused those perfect breasts to rise and fall, barely contained within that low-cut corset. Her hair was done up, glittering with gold chains and dotted with pearls, with just a few careful curls artfully allowed to slip the net and lie against her flawless cheek. Her right hand rested on Azrael’s bent arm and his right hand rested on hers, at least until he reached out to grip the bannister. His claws scraped at the gilded wood, so much louder than his voice when he said, “Where have you been?”

There was never any doubt who he was asking, so Lan answered. “At lessons.”

Azrael’s eyes brightened as they narrowed. “Do. Not. Lie to me.”

“We had them outside today,” said Lan. “That’s all.”

“My lord, if I may—” Master Wickham began.

“I do not address you.”

“It’s not his fault,” said Lan.

“I do not ask fault.” His voice raised on the last word, creating a blameful echo to bounce around the room. He waited until it was entirely gone before he spoke again. “You do not have my will to wander freely in Haven. I thought I had made that clear to you, but it seems you found some ambivalence in my words when I forbade you to leave the palace.”

“Unless I was with a guard.”

Azrael’s gaze cut sidelong to Master Wickham.

“I was with Deimos,” Lan said quickly.

“Were you.” Azrael moved a few long strides forward, letting his claws scrape over the carved rail. There was a pattern, imperceptible to the eye at this distance, but with its own unique sound: sss-tak-tak-sss-tok-sss-tak-tak. “And yet, Deimos returned some four hours ago, much displeased to learn you had not returned some eight hours ago. So. You were not under guard and I am forced to ask again.” His voice, so soft, became a sudden thunder: “Where were you?”

Lan had closed her eyes against the blast of his rage. Now she opened them, but it was still some time before she could bring herself to answer. “We went to the wall.”

He halted, mid-stride. Under his hand, the bannister splintered. “You left Haven.”

“No. Just as far as the wall.”

“For lessons.” Azrael showed his teeth. It was not a smile. “I would not have thought there was much reading material at the wall.”

Lan glanced at Master Wickham, who did all he could to shake his head without moving, then went ahead and said it anyway. “There’s a woman out there. In the wastes. They wanted me to see her.”

Master Wickham closed his eyes.

“They said she might come here and when she does, you’re going to think I said all this just so I could stay. Because she might be…I don’t know…sweeter than me. Maybe she’ll sing or dance or do something girly and grand that I don’t know how to do and don’t know how to want to do.” Rainwater dripped from her hair and down her face, warm as tears. She wiped it away. “Even when I know I should.”

“But there were Eaters at the wall also,” he said. The bannister groaned as his claws dug deeper. “And so you returned.”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. She tried to think back, but all she remembered of the Eaters, curiously, was Deimos’s boots. “It should have been for them, huh? If it wasn’t for her, it should have at least been for them. But I don’t think it was.”

His expression, what she could see of it behind the mask, did not change. “Why, then?”

“Because he told me to,” she admitted, pointing unnecessarily at Master Wickham, who looked back at her with very polite alarm. “I actually needed him to tell me to. I stood on that stupid wall and I looked right at those stupid Eaters and I…still…” She wiped her face again, over and over, trying to laugh. “…had to be told.”

Azrael took that in with a judicial sound, somewhere between a hum and a growl. Again, he studied Master Wickham, standing with his neck deferentially bent in the presence of his lord. “Go,” he said at length. “We will speak later. For now, go…in my good favor.”

The dead man spared Lan one sidelong, troubled frown as he bowed, then touched her sleeve once in an apologetic gesture that might have meant anything from ‘Sorry I took so long in the crypt’ to ‘Sorry you’re about to be impaled’ and left her alone in Azrael’s burning stare.

Azrael pulled his claws from the bannister, leaving dark gouges in the golden paint, and moved toward the stair. His dolly tried to come with him; he halted her with an upraised hand, never taking his eyes from Lan. He descended the curved arm of the stair at an unhurried, undistracted pace and circled her once, inspecting the whole of her, from the muddy hem of her skirt all the way up to her windblown, bedraggled hair. When he came around again to face her, he hooked one clawed finger beneath her jaw and tipped her head back, examining first one and then the other side of her bare, pale throat. He made that sound again, but said nothing.

“About that night,” she began.

“You will not speak of that here.”

“I just—”

“You will be silent.”

“I can’t.”

“Then you will be gagged,” he told her, and every pikeman in the room shifted in unison, all of them poised to receive the order. “And if that is not enough, I will find other ways to silence you. You will not speak of that night! That is my only word on it and my every word is command here! If you disobey me, human, you will learn the price of disobedience!”

“Please!” Her throat tightened and would not loosen. She looked at her reflection on the wet floor and pushed the words out, one by one. “I have to say something. Please,” she finished, scarcely above a whisper. “It’s important.”

The sound of water dripping off Lan’s hair onto the floor was very loud.

Azrael folded his arms. “Say it, then.”

It was the best of all the possible responses that had tormented Lan on the long walk back to the palace, but her heart still sank to hear it. She ignored it—this wasn’t about feelings, it was barter—and made herself take inventory of the pieces left in her purse. There were a few dull gleams, a few promising sparks…she offered none of it. She stared at the floor (a small puddle of dirty water had spread out ahead of her dragging skirts, something for the servants to clean up later), and at Azrael’s feet, clawed, like his hands. His toes flexed, impatient; the gold ring he wore on one of them flashed in the lamplight.

“Please take me back.”

She’d rehearsed it so much better in her head. There’d been explanations, clarifications, even apologies (that always seemed to stop short of actually admitting she’d said anything wrong, but nevertheless won his forgiveness). She’d been all afternoon cleaning the potch off her speech and polishing the stone and she’d done it precisely so she wouldn’t blurt out something stupid like this.

Azrael let the words fall between them and shatter. His gaze did not soften. His fingers drummed once on his bicep. He waited.

Dull heat itched at her cheeks. She had to say it. She knew it, accepted it, and still every word came out like a broken bone. “I…didn’t mean everything I said that night.”

He sneered through his mask. “Is that all?”

“What do you want?” she whispered. It was the worst way to start, short of kneeling before him and kissing that ring. “Just tell me what you want, okay? You don’t have to buy it. I’m not in any position to sell and we both know it. I…” She looked around, hunting for help on the walls, the lights, the pikemen, but the room was empty, the lights were electric and the pikemen were dead. She was alone here, alone with him, but he wasn’t alone with her. His dolly was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. His city was filled with his people, alive and dead, and she was only one of them…and not irreplaceable. “I need you,” she said.

His eyes flickered. When their light steadied, they were brighter. “And?”

She raised her hand and held it out, empty, then let it drop again with a slap to her wet skirt. “I need you. Tell me what you want.”

“What do I want?” He unfolded his arms and advanced one step, only one, his eyes burning bright enough to burn colors across her sight. “You know what I want. You told me plainly enough, and whether you knew it or not, you were right. I want you.”

She could only shake her head, not in defiance, but in helplessness. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I don’t want you to be here.” He cut his arm through the air, summing up and dismissing all of Haven at once, then seized her arm and yanked her stumbling to him. He caught her chin in a rough grip, forcing her head back, making her look at him and see the way he looked at her. “I want you to be mine.”

“Azrael—”

“Lord! Lord Azrael! Whose is this city? Whose, this conquered land?” He pulled her even closer, his face mere inches from hers. “I own you. Before ever I set eyes on you, I owned you. You were born into my possession. You have waited all your life upon my whim to claim you.” He took a breath—her breath, drawn from her body—and snarled, “And I am done bartering for what I own. Say that you are mine.”

“Please—”

“Say it!” he shouted, full into her face. “I will not share you with your fool’s dream, not one more day! Surrender all to me! Every piece! There is nothing for you beyond Haven! There is no Norwood and no hungering dead! You are mine!”

“Don’t. Please, don’t.” She could barely hear the words she spoke, but she could taste them—a high, bitter taste like fear, or climax when it hit too hard to feel good. “Don’t make me choose between you and the world…or…”

“Or you’ll what?” he challenged, his eyes blazing until their fire overfilled the sockets of his mask.

“Or I will.”

He drew back, then released her with a shove and turned away, rubbing beneath his mask at his scars as he paced to the stairs and away from them, from one wall to the other, around her and behind her, but never quite in arm’s reach of her again. Lan watched him when he was in front of her. When he wasn’t, she watched his red-haired dolly, the way her eyes moved to track him, wary even from her safe distance. If there was a safe distance.

“I need you,” Lan said again, as if this were a fairy tale and saying it for the third time would break the curse and everything would be sunshine and singing mice. Instead, he spat laughter at her back and kept pacing. She watched the muddy spot beneath her slowly dry on the marble floor. She had nothing else to offer him. There was nothing else to say.

“Where were you?” he asked finally. “Lie to me…if you have to. Just tell me. Tell me you never left.”

“I didn’t. I’ll never run from you, Azrael.”

“So you say.”

“I mean it.”

“Then where were you? Where, for eight hours?” His claws scraped on the wall as he pushed himself away from it; on the landing, his dolly backed up a step, but Lan stood and let him come. “If you weren’t running, where were you?”

“Some church.”

His eyes flared, throwing her shadow black on the tiles in front of her. “And do you stand before me now armored in your absent God’s love? Shall you combat me in His name? I warn you, child, I have survived hundreds of exorcisms and never suffered more than scented smoke in my eyes.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing, just stood and dripped on the floor.

“What did you pray for?” he asked at last. “What can He give you that I cannot?”

“I didn’t pray for anything. I don’t even know how. There’s only a few older folk who do that Jesusy talk in Norwood and even they don’t do it very loud.”

“Why, do you suppose?”

“Because the dead got up,” Lan replied, not stabbing him with it, but only saying it. “Even the good ones, the Jesusmen. And they ate people. And God didn’t stop it. So if God doesn’t care about us, why should anyone care about Him?”

He grunted, more a stir of hot breath at the nape of her neck than a sound. She heard him walk away behind her, then the familiar drumming of his claws on some hard surface or another. “Why go to church then, if not to pray?”

“I don’t know. Because it was there.” Lan picked at her sleeve, pulling fabric away from her arm and squeezing to watch the water run out, then said in her best Master-Wickham, “Because it’s the last surviving example of Byzantine revival architecture. Because over a hundred different kinds of marble were used in its construction and someone ought to see it.”

He paused behind her. “Westminster.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” She looked around, surprised, just in time to see him turn his back to her and pace away. She faced front again and found his dolly glaring her down. “Master Wickham wanted to go. We shouldn’t have stayed so long, but—”

“It’s easy to lose time in that place.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Oh yes. On my last march to take the palace, I passed the night there. In the Chapel of St. Paul.” He hesitated, then said, “They set stars in the ceiling above the altar. Did you see them?”

She had to think about it. Her eventual nod was unsure. “I didn’t know those were supposed to be stars. I thought they were just dots.”

“They were stars,” he said with quiet insistence. “The first I had seen since the war’s beginning. One hundred nineteen stars, made of stone and paint. When I saw them through the smoke, they struck me…oddly. I watched them for hours.” Another pause. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I prayed?”

“Was it raining?”

Silence. On the landing, still watching, his dolly hugged herself and frowned.

“Yes,” Azrael said softly. “It rained.”

“It should rain on bad days.” Lan looked down at her dress and wrung out the other sleeve. “The day my mother died, it was sunny. Warm. Like, just the nicest day, you know? It didn’t feel real, any of it. But it’s rained every night since you and I…since I started sleeping alone.” Lan scuffed a toe through the wettest part of the puddle she’d made, smearing it into streaks. “Would you call that an omen?”

He came a step closer, then moved away. “I call it weather.”

“I miss you.”

Azrael’s footsteps stopped and this time, did not resume. She could feel a faint warmth between her shoulderblades, see her shadow thrown long and dark ahead of her as his eyes burned on her back. He said nothing, but the sound of his dolly breathing was suddenly very loud.

“I miss your bed. I miss being in the dark with you. I miss seeing this.” Lan held her hand up before her face, angled to catch his eyelight on her palm. “And I hate that I miss it. You…You made me feel what it is to sleep alone. It ought to be the same as before I ever knew you, but it isn’t. I can’t even say how. It just isn’t.”

The light got brighter, but still he did not speak.

She let her arm fall, shaking fresh droplets free to scatter on the tiles. “I want to come back to you, Azrael. Even if it’s just to bed, just for tonight. Please. I can’t give you any more than I have, but I can come back if you ask me. And if you can’t ask me, then…then send me away. Right now. Tonight. Because it’s already raining and I…” She pulled in a shuddering breath and made herself laugh, the sound indistinguishable from a child’s sob. “I can’t lose you on another nice day.”

Shadows fell over her as he walked away, but not far. He stopped close enough that she could hear his breaths behind her, harsh in the air and the rasp of his hand rubbing up under his mask.

That was all for the longest time, time measured out by the rain hitting the windows outside, raining just as hard as it could rain.

“Damn you,” he muttered. “Ah, Lan…Lan, come here.”

She turned and took two steps, unsteady as a child just learning to walk, then somehow ran across the wet floor in her slippers without losing her footing. She fell against him; he stiffened, hissing in one breath and never taking another. His hand flew up as if to slap her away, only to hover there. He stayed that way, silent and immoveable as stone, while she pressed herself close. Water squeezed out of her dress in rivers, beading up on his chest and trickling down to the floor, falling into his open wounds and seeping out again stained grey.

“I’m sorry I’m wet,” she said, barely at a whisper, like a secret. “I’m sorry I’m so wet.”

Slowly, his tense muscles unlocked. His claws scratched across her scalp, combing through her damp hair before his arm came to rest at last around her shoulders.

His dolly’s eyes darted back and forth between them, breathing faster and louder until, just before it could be properly called a sob, she struck the rail with her gloved hand and shrilled out, “I was here! I was right here the whole time! I…I…I was an hour dressing up! She was off running in the street and I was…here…”

Azrael looked at her and held Lan. He said nothing. Nothing.

His dolly raised her hand as if to hit the rail some more, then just closed it in a fist. She gave Lan one last glare and marched herself away, her chin high and her back very straight.

“I said I was sorry,” Lan mumbled, watching her go.

“I heard you.”

“I mean it.”

“I believe you.”

“But you don’t forgive me!”

“No. Not yet.” He brought her closer against the awful chill of his body, almost rocking her, and sighed one last time. “But I will. Come to bed, Lan. Come to bed.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He held her until she fell asleep, which was nice in an awful, clammy way, but when she woke up, she was alone and the woman from the wastes was in Haven. Maybe she’d made her last run on her own or maybe Azrael had sent someone out to get her, but however it happened, she was here and she was his.

Lan knew this, not because she saw her and certainly not because anyone told her, but because Serafina brought a tray to Azrael’s room the next morning and told Lan to eat quickly because they had to go to town. If Lan didn’t already know she was being run off so the new girl could be settled in—and she did—she knew it soon enough. The errands Serafina kept pulling out of her perfect ass all had to do with dressing up: new measurements and designs for more gowns, fittings for slippers, picking out belts and gloves and all the twee glittery shit that set a ‘look’ off proper. She even went to a hat shop. Hats, for fuck’s sake, who wore hats anymore? Why was anyone even making them?

Eventually, Serafina ran out of ways to waste time and took her back to the palace, so at last Lan knew what it took to make her glad to go to lessons. But when she got to the library, Master Wickham seemed to have given up on her and was packing himself up to leave.

“I’m here,” Lan protested, hardly able to believe she was protesting. “I know I’m late, but it wasn’t my fault, I swear.”

He waved her over, but kept right on shuffling papers together and tucking them into his briefcase.

Lan didn’t move. “Are you all right?”

“I’m in a beastly mood, but it’s nothing to do with you. Directly. Come, sit. We won’t have time for lessons today, so I thought we’d have a chat. Just the regular sort of chat,” he assured her, reading her apprehensive thoughts before they’d even fully formed. “I don’t suppose you’ve eaten? It’s a bit late for luncheon, but I have a spot of something here.” He gestured toward the fireplace and the table closest to it, laid out with biscuits and little sandwiches. “The tea’s gone, but you don’t care for it anyway. I put the coffee there, by the fire, so it should still be warm for you, even if it isn’t fresh.”

“This is you in a beastly mood?” she asked as she filled a teacup with biscuits and took the coffee, kettle and all, away with her.

“Positively venomous,” he agreed. “My day is half-gone, my schedule is in ruins and neither is likely to change in the foreseeable future. I believe I’ve told you how upsets to my routine, ah, upset me. The very real possibility that this latest upset is soon to become my routine is no-end galling to me.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Lan, taking her seat. It was warm. The significance of that took a minute to reach full impact. She knew she ought to keep quiet, that nothing she said or did at that point would make any difference, and would only sound like a jealous chavvy whining anyway. All true, all well and good, and still as soon as Lan’s mouth opened, out came, “I was run around town all morning so some blousy bint can do my lessons for me, is that how it is?”

Master Wickham gave her his most severe frown. “You should know better than that.”

“Yeah?” Lan asked suspiciously.

“You’ll each do your own lessons.”

“I knew it! Who is she?”

“She’s none of your concern. All you need to know is that she’ll have lessons in the morning, from nine until one o’clock. You’ll have afternoons, from two until six. Thus assuring neither of you will have adequate opportunity to learn anything. Flaming bloody ruins!” he concluded.

“Why can’t we just do lessons together?”

“You have two entirely different curriculums.”

“Oh balls to that! I don’t need you hovering over me every second of the day, do I? She can sit over there and I can sit over here and you can go back and forth between us. What’s this really about?”

“Our lord’s living companions have been known to conspire against him in the past. Others have attempted to eliminate their rivals. As a precaution, they are rarely allowed to associate with one another. It isn’t personal,” he assured her. “Just a precaution. Better safe than sorry and all that.”

“So I don’t even get to meet her?”

“Why would you want to?”

She snorted. “We’re about to have a lot in common.”

Sarcasm rarely had the expected effect on him. This time, it seemed to bring on a startling revelation.

“You’re upset, aren’t you?” he said.

“No!” Lan rolled her eyes and threw herself back in her chair, picking restlessly at its scuffed arms. “Maybe. Not the way you’re thinking, though. It’s not about her as much as it is, you know…him. Why did he keep her?”

She could actually see him sifting his answer through finer and finer grades of tact, until all he was left with was, “Did you really think he wouldn’t?”

“No, I know. I get it. She reached the gate, so he had to be hospitable and give her a look at him and then, I don’t know, maybe she offered or maybe he asked. Whatever. I shouldn’t even care. We’re fucking, we’re not dating. But…he took me back. He took me to bed, anyway.” She acknowledged the difference with half a laugh, unconvincing even to her own ears. “I went to bed with him, thinking we were all the way back to where we were before I mucked it up, and he waited for me to go to sleep so he could go out and pick up another girl. So yeah, it stings a little. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.”

He seemed to know some response was expected, but was clearly at a loss as to what it might be, so after an awkward stretch of time, he went back to the table by the fire and brought her the cream and sugar for her coffee. It was weirdly touching.

“Never mind me,” said Lan, fixing up her drink. “Tell me about her.”

“I don’t think that would be appropriate conversation.”

“I don’t take etiquette anymore.” Lan underscored that fact by helping herself to a handful of biscuits and propping one slippered foot up on the desk. “What’s her name?”

“I shan’t say,” he said with gentle reproach.

“Well, what’s she like?”

She thought she’d have to wrestle an answer out of him and when she did, it would be as vague as possible, but he said straightaway, “She’s a goer.”

Lan blew biscuit right out of her mouth and across her primer. “She’s a what?” she choked, snatching at a napkin while Master Wickham peered at her with mild alarm.

“A goer,” he said again, and blinked as she sputtered out more crumbs and laughter.

“What the hell kind of assessment did you give her to make that out, mate?”

“Just the standard reading and comprehension—Oh, I see,” he said, rolling his eyes. “A goer, as a jovial reference to one’s sexual stamina. Charming.”

“Yeah, and you gave her a bit of the old ‘standard assessment.’” Lan snickered and took another biscuit. “Why? What’s it mean to you?”

He plucked up another napkin and used it to brush away her mess in silence.

“Aw, come on! It caught me out, is all. Tell me.”

He glanced at her, shaking crumbs into the bin. She put on her humblest, sorriest face and he must have decided she meant it, because he said, “I try to avoid making sweeping generalizations. Death is complicated. Life, even more so. And people, ah! Having said that, I’ve come to believe there are, or at least, that I only see two kinds of people: the kind who stay and the kind who go.”

“What kind am I?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But I am quite confident our newest arrival is a goer of the first order. So don’t get too accustomed to half-days. They won’t last.”

“Is she pretty?” Lan asked, directing all her attention to her coffee as she stirred it.

“She has a certain pleasing symmetry,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “But there’s something of a lean and hungry look about yon Cassius which I personally find rather off-putting.”

Cassius, eh? Lan smiled to herself and took another spoonful of sugar. “Do you like her?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do you like her?” Lan repeated, drawing little loops in the air with her biscuit as she spoke, as if writing the question out for him.

“I do not, now that I think about it.” He neatened a few papers in his briefcase. “I would go so far as to say that I dislike her. Fancy that.”

“Bad student, is she?”

“No, actually, I expect she’ll be quite a good one. But that isn’t entirely true either. She was quiet and attentive during her assessment, but she reads…I’m certain she reads…and she claims she can’t.”

“Why the hell would anyone lie about that?”

“Why indeed,” he murmured, frowning into space for a bit before he shrugged it away. “They all lie, the living. Even you. If she wants to waste her time pretending to learn a thing she already knows, I suppose it’s her time to waste, but I do wish I knew why she’s wasting it in this particular manner.”

“Maybe she likes you.”

“Mm.”

Lan ate a biscuit, watching him think, then leaned conspiratorially toward him and said, “Maybe she likes you.”

“Do you think so?” He seemed surprised and pleased by the suggestion. “I am told I have a personable way about me. It’s one of the reasons our lord appoints me to tutor his consorts and to act as his intermediary after they’ve left his, ah, intimate company.”

“Do I want to know what that means?”

“Intermediary?” Taking a small pencil from his pocket, he wrote the word out in her primer, indicating the salient points as he spoke them. “Inter, a prefix meaning ‘in the midst of.’ Medi, from the Latin media or medium, for ‘an environment’ or other means by which something is carried or achieved. Ary, meaning ‘having the character of or pertaining to’. Intermediary, ‘one who goes between’. This means that our lord’s former consorts communicate with him through me. At least in theory. In reality, if I did not make it my business to look in on them regularly, I doubt I’d see them any more often than he does. Our lord fails to consider that familiarity is not the same as trust or friendship.”

“I’ll intermediate with you,” Lan said loyally. As an experiment, she dipped a biscuit in her coffee and sucked at it. Soggy, but tasty. “Hang on, ‘one of the reasons’? Why would he need reasons? Didn’t you say you were raised just to teach us dollies?”

He gave her a rare censuring frown. “I do wish you wouldn’t call yourself that. It’s demeaning. And no, I never said that. I said I was raised for the purpose of teaching.”

“His Children?” Lan guessed.

“No. Well, yes, for a time, but I was his tutor originally.”

“Azrael’s?” Lan looked around, trying to picture Azrael at one of the tables with a primer open before him and a pencil in his hand, scrawling out the same shaky letters as she had only just begun to master. “Really?”

“Yes. He had a voracious appetite for learning in the earliest years of his ascension. His memory, of course, gives him a unique advantage in languages. He speaks hundreds of them, dozens of which have been lost to human understanding. His mind holds priceless insights to this world’s history, to the very birth of civilization…” He trailed off, then shook his head. “…and its death. Such a waste. In any event, he could speak, but not read or write, and so I taught him. In fact, I was engaged as his tutor before my death.”

“He told you that?”

“No.”

Lan looked at him curiously over her coffee, recalling Azrael’s surprise (if surprise was the right word for that dark distraction) at hearing that Master Wickham knew his name. “Do you…Do you remember it?”

“Our lord does not permit us to retain our living memories. And having seen…well, no,” he interrupted with a self-deprecating chuckle. “That’s hardly pleasant tea-time conversation.”

“Seen what?”

“Really, Lan, I’d rather not. And I’m certain you’d rather not hear it.”

“I don’t know what kind of hothouse flower you think I am,” said Lan with half a smile, “but I can just about guarantee I’ve seen worse in Norwood than anything you have here in Haven.”

“Perhaps. But I predate Haven by some three months.” He looked down at the book where the word intermediary sat alone on its page. “And they were bad months.” He closed the book. “But if you insist, as I see you are prepared to do, I’ll tell you. When our lord claimed this land, he offered amnesty to the living if they agreed to relinquish it. Certain promises were made. But when he made landfall, he was met with armies.” A pause. “I can’t imagine that surprised him.” A longer pause. “Yet he took…a terrible vengeance.”

Lan, who had grown up with nothing but a wall between her and an ever-present horde of rotting, howling, hungry corpses, ate her biscuit and waited impatiently for him to get to the good part.

“When they were dead, Lord Azrael raised them up as what you call Eaters, but…not quite. They…” Master Wickham frowned, tapping one finger against the cover of his book in a gesture that could only have been culled from Azrael himself. “They knew who they were,” he said at last. “They knew what they had become. He made them his vanguard, sent them against their former companions, against neighbors and friends…family…and he made them know what they were doing even as he denied them the power to stop. Before we had reached the palace, they could do nothing but scream. And eat.”

With some effort, Lan took another sip of coffee, but it was a long time before she could swallow it. “What happened to them?”

“He raised them to rot.” Master Wickham shrugged with his hands. “He let them. But he pushed them out beyond the wall, where he didn’t have to listen. To my knowledge, no matter how angered, he has never raised their like again. And I, for one, am grateful. Memory is not a comfort to the dead.”

“That’s what he said.”

“Is it?” He looked away, then shook his head. “Well, I like to think I’d believe it anyway.”

“So you don’t remember anything from before you died? Nothing at all?” She hesitated, then said, “Not even your name?”

He gave her a quizzical glance that bloomed into one of understanding. He smiled, nodding at her as if to award a point. “No, I don’t remember Wickham, but I’m quite sure I am he. Ask me why.”

“Why?” asked Lan obediently.

“I am a tidy man in this incarnation and I’ve reason to believe I was a tidy man in life. Apparently, I changed clothes regularly in a public setting, but so meticulous were my habits that I wrote my name in the linings of my garments so as to be certain no other man mistook them for his own.”

“Maybe you stole the real Wickham’s togs.”

“I acknowledge the possibility, but I strongly doubt it, for two reasons. First, it would have left the hypothetically ‘real’ Wickham naked as a jaybird somewhere in the world while I scampered about in his full attire. I find that sort of thing, those…pranks,” he said, as if to rhyme the word with ‘feces’, “to be the entertainment of low minds and a cruel nature. Second, as I say, I am a tidy man. When I was raised, I wore a suit. The pockets were emptied, of course, but the tie was still properly knotted. The shoes were neatly laced. I wore sock suspenders. And, making no assumptions as to my former self’s private life, I say such a man would never wear another man’s underpants under any circumstances.”

“Nice detective work,” Lan said with real admiration. “None of the other deadheads seem the least bit curious who they used to be.”

“Don’t call me that, please. I find it offensive. Anyway, I was something of an early specimen. Perhaps he hadn’t yet perfected his technique.”

“So do you still teach him?”

“Oh no. No, I rarely see him anymore. Every so often, he takes a notion to discuss a particular subject—philosophy, theology, art—but he hasn’t done so for several years. I suspect I make him uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

He studied her for a moment, oddly reserved. “Do you honestly want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Honestly.”

His reluctance…but that wasn’t the right word, was it? There was no uncertainty about his question, no hesitance in his hesitation. Looking at him, Lan had the unreasoning and unshakeable sense that he was ready to tell her, if—and only if—she wanted to know.

And if she didn’t before, she really did now.

“Yes,” she said.

“I was raised to be his teacher,” he said again. “To that end, I had to retain some of my previous knowledge, else how could I teach him? And although I have no clear memory of my former life, there are impressions, very indistinct, that resonate now and then. His voice…a room with white walls…I’m quite certain I knew him in life, worked with him in an—” He gestured to the closed book on the table between them. “—intermediary capacity.”

“What happened?”

“Something foolish, I should think. I’m not a very likely looking assassin,” he added, almost as if apologizing, “but then, I should think few of them would be. If one went skulking about in a perfidious manner all the time, it might draw undesirable attention. Shall I tell you a secret?”

“I can keep one.”

He leaned a little closer and dropped his voice to something that was not quite a whisper, only a breath that took the vague shape of words. “I can only surmise I tried to kill him, although I’ve no idea how I went about it. But I do know, as near as one can come to knowing, that he killed me. Himself.”

“How did you—How do you reckon?”

Master Wickham hooked two fingers under the collar of his suit jacket and pulled it and the crisp white collar of the shirt he wore beneath down maybe two inches. There, after a moment’s squint, Lan saw two white specks, almost perfectly rounded and slightly indented from the rest of his skin. Her first thought, bubbling up from the deep well of childhood, was vampires. Which was silly, but how much sillier than any other walking undead?

“What am I looking at?” Lan asked, touching one. It didn’t feel like skin at all, not even Azrael’s skin.

“Scars. Of a sort. Left by his claws. When I was raised, I could even see the mark of his hand, but it faded after a year or so. The dead don’t heal of their own power,” he added, covering himself up again. “And those like me don’t decay. Truthfully, I’m not certain of the physiology at work, but even though the worst bruises break down over time, our wounds never close unless our lord himself sees to it. There are yet a number of mortuary cosmeticians on staff who tend, ah…formerly tended to Lady Tehya, but I hardly think this little matter requires their expertise. I find a little wax keeps them nicely sealed.”

“Wax,” Lan echoed. Her fingernail pricked at one of the marks and she felt it pry up a little. “May I?”

“Certainly. It doesn’t hurt.”

Lan pinched the thing out, watching with queasy fascination as its true depth revealed itself. It was as long as her thumb-knuckle, much longer and far, far sharper than Azrael kept his claws now.

“It was an impassioned grip,” Master Wickham remarked, studying the white, waxy thorn in Lan’s palm as she peered into the dark, dry opening left in his neck. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he meant to kill me.”

Lan started to nod, only to twitch back in the first double-take of her entire life. When Master Wickham cocked a brow at her, she tried out a laugh that dispelled none of the shock she was still feeling (and had to be showing) and said, “That’s got to be the first time I’ve ever heard anyone here suggest Haven’s ‘glorious lord’ could even make mistakes.”

“Has he not peopled this city with them?”

She double-taked…double-took? She rocked back and stared at him again. “Wow. I don’t believe you said that. Couldn’t you get in trouble if someone heard you? Someone else, I mean.”

He smiled at her. “I can trust you, can’t I?”

“Sure. We’re intermedi-mates. But it’s still a pretty daring thing to say out loud. Seems like that’s exactly the kind of talk that can get a dead man killed.”

“The evidence is suggestive. I have never known him to kill solely for amusement, therefore it was a punishment. If he were of a mind to execute me, I would have been impaled or dismembered or dispatched in some other manner by a third party. He very rarely takes a personal hand, so to speak, in executions, unless he was himself provoked to rage. Even if so, the damage done to me was minimal. My larynx, trachea, thyroidal cartilage—all intact. He could have broken my neck easily, yet did not. This suggests a certain element of restraint. Yet his claws punctured my flesh, which again points to rage.” He spread his empty hands with a smile. “I can only conclude my death was, if not entirely an accident, at least unintended.”

“You think he’s sorry he did it?”

“Perhaps. He raised me, after all, and set me to serve him in a position of some importance. He’s always treated me fairly. Some might even say with respect.” He seemed to think it over, only to shrug it off. “It’s a moot point, but in any event, it’s all over now.”

“Moot as a boot,” Lan agreed, because she really did not want to know what moot meant or how to spell it. She handed the bit of wax back, thinking he might fit it into the hole again like a cork in a bottle, but he simply dropped it in the bin he kept under the table. “So you don’t miss him at all?”

“Him? No. When I have no student, I miss that. And I miss talking,” he said in a tone of some surprise. “He didn’t require much in the way of teaching. Mostly, we’d just talk. I enjoyed that.”

“What did you and him talk about the most?”

“You and he,” he corrected. “This is the subjective form, used when the people referred to are doing the action in the sentence. ‘You and him’ would only be used when the people referred to are the object of the action.”

Lan covered her eyes. “Fine, yeah, whatever…”

“When in doubt, remove the ‘you’ from the sentence and consider again. ‘What did him talk about?’ or ‘What did he talk about?’”

“I’m not even sure I care anymore.”

He opened his book to make another note, then gave her hand a pat. “We’ll have plenty of time to study nominative and accusative case during our lessons. To answer your question, we frequently discussed architecture. As you know, I’m quite taken with the subject, so much so that I suspect he inadvertently imbued me with the interest.”

“Again with that accidental stuff. That’s subversive, that is.”

“Let us examine the evidence. I may have been raised before the taking of Haven, but there was never any real doubt it would be taken. He would have known, long before he began his last march, that any holding he seized would need defending the rest of his days…or Man’s. Such a city could not merely be inhabited, it must be built. These are among my first thoughts upon awakening to this existence, and yet, he instead made me his teacher. He never asked me to conduct research or put me to any use whatever, apart from this one. Why would he deliberately imbue me with an interest of which he never intended to take advantage? I say again it was a mistake. I say further, he is unaware he made it. Even in our discussions of the subject, he seldom invited my opinion and never asked for advice.” He paused, then said with a tentativeness that Lan found almost poignant, “Which is a pity. I had opinions. And I did my own research.”

“Why? I mean, if you’re not doing anything with it, why bother?”

“Why does anyone indulge a hobby? And for whatever reason, I find the subject fascinating. Haven’s architecture is uniquely diverse, you see. One can find examples of Gothic, Classical, Jacobean, Elizabethan, Georgian and numerous other styles all within walking distance of each other.” Crooking a finger at her in a ‘come with me’ gesture, he went to the wall, catching a ladder on the way and rolling it along with him to a particular set of shelves. He climbed up and began to thumb through the spines there, pulling this or that book out for closer examination. “So many accomplishments of the modern age have been made obsolete by…well, circumstances…but architecture is as vital today as it was fifty years or even fifty thousand years ago. And the more one understands it, the more one appreciates just how far we’ve come.” He passed her a book, smiling. “And how far we’ve fallen.”

“What is this?” she asked, taking it.

“What does it say?”

Lan glared at the runic scrawl across the cover, forcing the lines and loops to join together in that magical way that made sounds. “A wuh…wor…World. A World h…hiss…tor…yuh. Ya? What’s the sound a ‘y’ makes again?”

“At the end of a word, usually the same as a hard ‘e’.”

“Histor…ee? History. A World History of aaar…chuh…Archery?”

He tsked at her distractedly, picking out a few more books. “Try again.”

“Arch…Archer…damn it.” Lan took the book to a table and banged it down so she could use both hands to frame each letter at a time. “Aaaar…Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s architecture, isn’t it?”

“I’d rather you sound it out than guess,” he told her reprovingly. “And this one?”

Heaving a sigh, Lan went over and took the book he held out. The first word was impossibly long, so she skipped over to the next one and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “The f…Four…el…Elephant? Is it elephants?”

“No, Lan. Elephants had surprisingly little to do with the founding of the British Empire. Excepting India, I suppose,” he remarked to himself in a thoughtful way, before returning his attention to her. “Try again.”

She looked at the book, running her eyes over and over the same word, but still could only untangle the first three letters before it all broke apart. “Oh give over, won’t you? There’s, like, a thousand letters! Just tell me!”

“Understanding,” he said with a meaningful stare over the tops of those glasses he wasn’t wearing. “Understanding the Four Elements of Design.”

“Only four, huh? Let me guess. Windows, walls, roof and floor?”

“Close, actually. And you’ll like this one, I think. From the Ground Up. It focuses on pre-industrial methods of construction and is very relatable in our present era. And finally, one of my favorites.” The last book he pulled was bigger and heavier than the other three combined and, unlike the others, which were mostly words with some drawings, this one was all photographs with hardly any words at all. He also didn’t pass it down to her right away, but opened it up and began to flip through it, speaking in a slow, distracted manner as he studied each page. “It’s a pity so many of the modern landmarks are gone, because some of them were really very interesting…in their own way. Our lord has gone to considerable pains to preserve and restore areas of historical interest, including a number of cathedrals and estates…ah, the Royal Exchange and Old Bailey…several museums and, ah, monuments of note. I’m afraid he didn’t have much of an eye for what we would consider modern movements…but what one so often fails to take into measure is that, to him, they’re all modern movements. He has no more frame of reference for Tower Bridge than he has for City Hall.”

“Uh huh,” said Lan, who had no frame of reference for any of the damn buggering things he’d mentioned.

“Here, a perfect example. It’s nothing short of a miracle that the Gherkin survived our lord’s last march when so much of the business district was flattened and yet, he brought it down because he found the style unattractive. Now you can only see it in books.” He finally passed it down to her, open to a picture of what indeed appeared to be a giant glass pickle. “He had a garden installed in its place. It’s a beautiful garden, but it’s still a pity. Mind you, I don’t care for New Brutalism or the rampant commercialism which had risen up in response to tourism and I had no objections whatever when he removed those eyesores. In most respects, the city is quite improved by its restoration, but in a purely historical context, there has been a tragic loss.”

“This is Haven?” Lan turned a few pages, but saw nothing familiar in the shiny glass and steel towers lining the busy streets.

“It was. Before it was Haven.” Bending low on the ladder, the dead man flipped back through the book and tapped a page. The palace on a sunny day. The sky was blue as whore’s eyepaint and the street beyond the foreyard was filled with people, so many that at first, she thought they had to be Eaters. A few men stood watch on the step and beside the gate, wearing uniforms that made them look like caterpillars with bayonets. There was a great, round fountain with another of those golden angel-topped pillars at its center sprouting right where Lan knew there to be nothing but a flowerbed now. To see all this together in the same picture as Azrael’s palace was surreal.

The palace…She stared at it for a long time, knowing something was different, but unable to get her thumb on just what.

Then she saw it. Or rather, didn’t see it.

“Is something wrong?” the dead man asked.

“How old is this picture?” she demanded, turning it around to thrust at him.

“I don’t know, offhand. To judge by their hair and clothing…cameras…cars…” He frowned, his eyes darting over various points on the page. “Say…ten to twenty years before the ascension?”

“And this is the palace, right? This is right where we are?”

“More or less. The North Wing was largely demolished and had to be reconstructed. He was fairly faithful to the original design, but it’s not an exact recreation, as you can see. Our lord never attempted to replicate any one building or even any one era, merely to, as he put it, ‘capture a mood’. I imagine he’s seen a number of architectural eras come and go, and he certainly had strong opinions when it came to which of Haven’s buildings should be restored or demolished. I don’t think it’s at all overstating it to say that not a street lamp stands save by his design.”

She laughed.

He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she said, still smiling. “I just had a funny thought.”

And it was funny, if only because it was so blatantly stupid, and this, coming from someone who’d once had the thought to walk all the way to Haven and just ask the Devil nicely to please stop raising up dead people.

Master Wickham brought out another book, found a particular page and passed it down to her. “Do you recognize this?”

“Um…” It looked like a city, just any other slice of pre-ruined ruins. She saw shops and cars and signs she could finally read but that didn’t spell any words she knew—Samsung, TDK, Coca Cola. Maybe he saw Georges and Elizabeths and Jacobs, but all Lan saw were buildings, people and statues. But he was watching her, smiling in that shyish way, so she took another look, focusing on each façade in turn, trying to find some point of reference…and she found one. The most obvious one, in fact. A giant, naked point of reference on an even bigger bronze fountain. “That’s just outside the tailor, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. The statue of Anteros, commonly mistaken for Eros, astride the Shaftesbury memorial fountain. And that used to be Picadilly Circus.”

He said it like that meant something. It didn’t.

“You’ll notice some significant changes. The Underground has been sealed and of course, the video display was removed as being offensive to our lord’s eye, but most of the more historical structures were preserved, in spirit if not in a wholly physical sense.” He watched her turn pages, his expression gradually revealing a cautious sort of pleasure. “You are interested, aren’t you? I had the feeling you were only being polite on our earlier outings.”

“Aw, you know I’m never polite.” Lan went to the window and squinted out through the colored glass. The sun was just hitting that sweet spot that turned the sky to grainy gold and made all the buildings look like paper cut-outs. Their silhouettes made it harder to match them up to the color images in the book, but some of the rooftops looked familiar. “I didn’t realize he built so much. I thought he just moved in and kept it all running.”

“That may have been his initial plan, but one is quick to learn that a city is alive, whether or not those who reside there are also. Power needs to be generated and regulated. Sewer and storm drains have to be maintained. The rains that fell in those first years ate into stone and steel, so that everything had to be resurfaced or allowed to collapse. And of course, the living would have preferred to see the old city demolished rather than submit to Azrael’s rule, so there was that. Every brick of Haven required some element of repair, and while he had no end of menial laborers at his disposal, overseeing the work demanded a highly specialized knowledge our lord simply did not have.”

“So he took it.”

“He took it,” Master Wickham agreed. “In the beginning, he offered amnesty of a sort to those civil engineers willing to work for him, but that went about as well as you might expect.”

Lan thought of her mother, how proud she’d always been of the rebellion that followed Azrael’s ascension, and she had to hide a smile in the pages of the book, because that was people all over, wasn’t it? If you couldn’t win the war, at least you could say you’d spit on the Devil.

“So instead, he put a bounty on them,” Master Wickham continued, “and that did the trick rather nicely.”

Yeah, it would. Because that was people, too.

“How many did he get?” Lan asked.

“I’m not certain. At least fifty, of various specialties. But there was some…unpleasantness in those early days. Sabotage and so forth. It was just easier to kill them and raise them up, like me, with their expertise intact and their loyalties assured.” He looked away out the window, not at Haven, but just into the sky. “I was their intermediary too, while it lasted. There was one in particular of whom I was quite fond. Water management. Pretty girl.”

Lan blinked and looked up at him.

“We’d talk sometimes. Go for walks. And once…well.” He glanced at her and away again, shaking his head a little. “I used to see her fairly often, after her…shall we say, conversion. Of course, she was never the same, but I still liked to see her. I had the feeling she reminded me of someone.”

“I’m sorry,” Lan said awkwardly.

His brows knit. “For?”

“She’s…uh, you know…dead.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s still around. Perhaps not in the palace, but somewhere in Haven. Our lord hasn’t commissioned any major projects in ten years at least, but the streets aren’t exactly running thick with water management experts, are they?”

Lan started to nod agreement, then looked sharply up. “You think he kept her?”

“I couldn’t swear to it,” Master Wickham said with a hint of apology. “But I’ve no reason to think otherwise. Their talents are, like the cities they built, relics of a lost age. Even if he personally has no further need of them, he would want that talent safeguarded.”

“A lot of talents are gone.” Lan brushed her fingertips over a hundred faces, frozen in a moment of life, preserved only in paper. “A lot of people. He doesn’t care.”

“Many of the living who come here make the mistake of believing that our lord has no empathy, merely because he chooses so often to demonstrate no mercy. I assure you, he feels. And there is nothing he feels so deeply as loss.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I feel it, Lan.” Master Wickham climbed down from the ladder and joined her at the window, but his eyes were on the book in her hands, not the city before them. “Every day, in a thousand different moments, I am reminded there will never be another city to equal Haven. There may be other settlements, if Mankind survives his foolishness, and they may be great, but they will never be as great…no more than Haven could ever be as great as the old city from whose bones she has been raised.”

“You need to watch it with that talk. Anyone at all could be listening.”

“It can’t be treasonous if it’s true. And it’s the sort of thought I imagine comes at least in part from him. As I say, he’s stopped building. Three-quarters of Haven is no more than pastureland. Not even gardens, but pastures. Our lord’s cattle graze where millions of people once lived and worked and died. This is not the act of a man making a legacy for himself. This…” He moved closer to the window, clasping his hands behind his back and gazing restlessly and without expression at the empty city beyond the colored glass. “This is a monument to his remorse. I am daily astonished that he does not put us up, like dolls in the dollhouse he has outgrown, and leave us behind.”

That thought—that stupid, childish, impossible thought—tried to rise up again, to make itself more than just a thought, but an idea. Maybe even a plan. As much as to distract herself as him, Lan turned pages in her book blindly and said, “What’s this place?”

“Mm?” Master Wickham glanced at the picture under her finger, then took the book and turned it so he could read the tiny letters underneath. “Hampton Court,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “The Tudor palace.”

“Another palace?”

“Another and another and another, oh yes. One simply cannot swing one’s demised feline without hitting a royal residence in Haven. And that one is really rather significant, you know, home in its time to Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth, and George the Second. A true chimera, blending gothic Tudor design with magnificent baroque ornamentation. Look here, you can just make out the clock tower.” He tapped the page meaningfully. “That’s a pre-Copernican astronomical clock, Lan, and it still works.”

“Uh…crikey. You don’t say.”

“It’s even more shocking when one considers how badly damaged the grounds were during the ascension. The maze, the gardens, the great vine—all destroyed, although I’m told the structure itself came through largely intact.”

“You ever been?”

“No. I’ve seen it, of course, at a distance. It’s not that far, but then, Haven really isn’t all that big. It only seems that way when it’s full of people.” He tsked admiringly. “Look at those chimneys!”

“Chimneys, you say.” Lan took the book from him and squinted at it. “Chimneys are probably my favorite part of any building.”

“Are they really?”

“Hell, yeah. Tell me all about the chimneys. I’m riveted, here.”

“It’s difficult to know where to begin.” He thought, then said, “Would you like to go there?”

“Ugh.”

“Beg pardon?”

Lan managed not to say it twice, but she sure thought it hard. She didn’t mind listening to him talk about chimneys for a few hours (especially since she’d gotten awfully good at only pretending to listen while he talked), but going back out into Haven and standing in her slippered feet while Master Wickham lectured her on the history of flues did not appeal.

“Gosh, I’d love to,” said Lan, wearing her best dolly-eyes. “But I probably shouldn’t bunk off on my lessons again so soon after the last time. You got to space that shit out.”

“Nonsense. I see no reason to attempt lessons with this…this farcical schedule I have been forced to adopt. As far as I’m concerned, until this latest nuisance resolves itself, we can have an outing every day. How does that sound?”

“That…sounds…” Lan heaved a sigh and pressed the heels of both hands over her eyes. She never did know when to rein it in. “Brilliant,” she said, resigned.

“Then it’s settled,” he said, gathering up her books. “I’ll just have a servant take these to your room. You can read them at your leisure and let me know which chimneys interest you the most.”

“I’ll do that,” said Lan and had to laugh at the skillful way she’d built that trap around her feet. “I am fuck-wild about chimneys.”

“I feel the same way about columns,” he confided. “Come along.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There were ways to handle rejection that did not include running through the palace, kicking in a bedroom door and throwing another woman out by the hair, but Lan didn’t know what they were and was afraid to repeat herself too often. So she waited. She ate her meals off a tray and slept in a cold bed beneath a window that let all the weather in. Master Wickham continued Lan’s introduction to the many, many historic chimneys of Haven, with Deimos to accompany them. The Revenant’s presence was a distraction at first, a funereal shadow across even the brightest British day, but soon became a part of Lan’s new normal. As her awareness of him faded, her mind found an annoying new defense against the boredom of Master Wickham’s lectures: learning.

Not about chimneys. Not even particularly about architecture, although she absorbed some of that, the way she, as a child, had absorbed the ways and means of peach farming without anyone taking her aside and telling her directly what to do. But she did learn about building, about the way things broke down and the way they were raised up, and sometimes, as the learning bored into her reluctant brain, that same hazy thought she’d first had in the library would come back to her, no less laughable, but stubbornly pulling together into some sort of shape. Two shapes, really: the shape of the palace, with and without a tower. And sometimes, that perfectly ridiculous, impossible idea gave her the same sense of excitement as she’d felt walking out of Norwood for the last time or walking into Haven for the first time, like there was a plan and she was a part of it, like it was almost over.

But only sometimes. And the rest of the time, she was left to wonder if she was only pretending there was an idea there so she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. Or anyone.

Because there was so much time to think about it. Her days began in the Red Room, with a breakfast on a tray, often cold, and a fresh dress brought by a servant who was not Serafina. Her baths were lukewarm water poured from a pitcher into a basin, a handtowel and a bar of scented soap. She had her books to look at in the morning and another cold tray for lunch and then it was off to those odd, bookless lessons with Master Wickham and Deimos. Ostensibly, they ended at six. In reality, they were never home before nine and often not before midnight. The gate was always left open for her, the lamps always left lit, but no one waited up for her. Master Wickham would say his polite goodbye there in the foyer (after a few days, Deimos took to adding a curt sort of nod before he marched away) and then Lan would climb alone up all those bloody stairs to the Red Room to find her supper tray and put herself to bed. Serafina was never there to meet her. She suspected her handmaiden was off tending the other girl, Cassius, which robbed her of any sense of reprieve from Serafina’s impatient care.

In the eleven days that followed Lan waking up forgiven in Azrael’s bed, Lan saw him only once, and then it was from across a hall, through an open door, where he stood listening to some other dolly, not one Lan knew. Her, maybe. Lan could not make out their words, only the high piping of her speech and the low thunder of his replies. She didn’t try to get any closer, but even so, when she lingered to watch, his gaze shifted and he saw her.

His dolly kept talking, her hands like graceful little birds at the end of her arms, flying higher and higher in an effort to regain his attention, until at last, she turned. Her painted eyes first widened, then narrowed. Her lips pressed into a pink slash. With a savage glare at Azrael, she came to the door and slammed it shut.

Lan went on to the library alone. Sensing her lack of enthusiasm for the day’s outing, Wickham attempted to sweeten the pot by assuring her their destination had magnificent arches. Lan had been to enough buildings by now to know that couldn’t possibly be as dirty as it sounded, but she let him talk her into it anyway, mostly out of gratitude that he even bothered to act like there was a choice involved.

Wickham would tell her there was always a choice, Lan thought, climbing into the car where Deimos was already waiting. And then he’d talk about buttresses or some bloody thing for the rest of the day and Lan would come home well after dark with a finer understanding of the difference between gablets and pinnacles, only to discover that it was the same exact difference as between elephants and ostriches, which was to say, simultaneously enormous and unimportant. And she would go to bed alone at the top of her tower. And the day would be over. And she would never get it back.

Deimos opened the driver’s door and took his place behind the wheel.

“Stop the car,” said Lan.

The Revenant looked at her in the rearview mirror, then turned all the way around to show her the ignition key still in his hand. “I haven’t started it yet.”

“Sorry.” She waved at him and covered her eyes. “I’m sorry. Go on then.”

“Lan?” Master Wickham frowned at her with a fairly good approximation of concern for a dead man. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Fine.” Lan shook her head and looked back at the palace, at all those empty windows that opened on empty rooms. Mostly empty. Azrael was in one of them and not alone. She knew it, just like she knew that she couldn’t charge herself in and throw his dolly out the door every time he picked another girl over her. He still wanted her, that was the important thing. He wanted her, even if he didn’t want to see her or eat with her or go to bed with her. She knew it…because he said so. Eleven days ago. And he hadn’t spoken to her since.

“Lan?”

“I’m fine,” she said again and faced front. “Let’s go.”

The engine turned over. The car rolled forward.

“Stop the car,” said Lan.

Deimos stomped on the brakes hard enough to throw Lan against the back of his chair and looked at her again, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and glaring at her in the rearview mirror.

Lan got out of the car, but then just stood there, staring up at the yellow-brown sky and breathing in the damp air. She could smell green grass and flowers, wet pavement, cow shit and chickens. Good smells. Grounding. There was no smoke, no rot, no Eaters to sour the air. It could be a beautiful day if she let it. What could she possibly accomplish by going back now, getting between him and another girl?

He might forgive her—he had the last time she’d done it—but deep down, she knew he wouldn’t always. Deeper still, she knew he shouldn’t have to. She ate the peach. She’d brought it to her own lips with her own hand and bit. She belonged to him. A dolly doesn’t get to jump down from her shelf and demand to be played with. A dolly waits and never mind how long, because a dolly’s owned.

Funny, how a girl could agree with all that and still want to punch another girl straight in the tit.

“Lan.”

“I won’t,” she promised sourly.

“Won’t what?”

Lan glanced back at Master Wickham, then sighed and turned all the way around. “Listen, I need you to do something for me, if you can. Two things, really, because I also need you to do it without telling me how it won’t work. I know it won’t work,” she said as Master Wickham’s brow furrowed. “But here’s the thing. I have to try. I have to be able to say I did everything I could, even the stupid stuff…or else it’s like I didn’t do anything, you know?”

He studied her in silence for maybe a minute, then said, “You’re not coming, are you?”

“No. I’ve got to stay here and…and figure some stuff out.”

“And you honestly expect me to go off to Hyde Park without you?”

Lan hesitated.

“No,” he answered for her, both eyebrows climbing. “You expect me to go somewhere else. And do what exactly?”

She told him.

Both he and Deimos tipped their heads at exactly the same time and to exactly the same angle.

“I can’t,” Master Wickham said, not shocked or outraged, but only stating a fact. “I thought you understood. I haven’t the faintest notion where to find them.”

“I do,” said Deimos.

All the surprise Wickham had not shown for Lan’s request now came out as he looked at the Revenant. “I can hardly ask the captain of our lord’s elite guard to help in this. You must have some idea why she’s asking.”

“Oh yes.”

“Forgive me,” said Wickham, now peering at the other dead man as though he stood half a mile away and not right there in the front seat, “but if there were ever a textbook written on the subject of preserving Haven, this would be the textbook definition of how not to preserve Haven.”

“I do my lord’s will. If I do this and the result is that it is his will to destroy what he has built here, so be it. If it is his will to destroy the woman who suggests it, so be it.” He glanced at Lan. “No offense.”

She shrugged. “So you’ll help?”

“I’ll drive.”

She looked at Master Wickham.

“Lan, I sympathize with your situation, as much as one can given our respective circumstances, but I cannot be recruited to your cause. Even if I believed rescinding the hungering dead was the right thing to do, and I don’t, I cannot act against my lord’s will.”

“I’m not trying to make you—”

“However,” he interrupted, silencing her with an upraised hand, “as your intermediary, it is my duty, appointed to me by Lord Azrael himself at my rebirth, to speak to the dead on your behalf. If that’s what you’re asking me to do, I don’t see how I can refuse.”

“That’s all,” Lan said quickly. “And maybe, you know, bring them back with you. But that’s all!”

“Dare I even ask what you’ll be doing in the interim?”

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “But don’t worry. I won’t be punching anyone in the tit.”

The dead men exchanged glances.

“I don’t know what troubles me more,” Wickham murmured. “The fact that she was apparently considering it at one point or the fact that I don’t quite believe her.”

“Americans,” Deimos replied with a small shake of his head and started up the engine again.

Lan did not bother to defend her nationality this time. She shut the car door (a bit harder than necessary) and left them to it.

The pikemen guarding the palace doors let her in without comment. No one on the inside gave her a second glance as she made her way through the halls, even after she picked up her skirts to run, but for all her hurrying, when she reached the room where she’d last seen Azrael and his redheaded dolly, it was empty.

She wasn’t going to search for him. What would be the point? The palace had a hundred rooms and Haven had a thousand palaces set down in the maze of its million streets. She really didn’t want to find him anyway, or at least, she didn’t want to find him with anyone. No, the far more sensible thing to do now would be just to go to the library and wait for Master Wickham.

So naturally, she went to Azrael’s private chamber, bracing herself against the possibility that his room (his bed) might not be empty when she flung the door open, but it was. The fire was off, the lamps were unlit, the fountain still. All was dark and quiet. Where was Azrael if he wasn’t here? He was never here at this time of day, Lan knew, but this made absolutely no difference right now. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to see her.

Lan retreated just far enough to stand out in the corridor with the dozen or so pikemen whose job it was to protect his privacy and carry his messages, trying to think past her tit-punching urge to her meagre store of sense. At last, she turned to one of them and said, “Go get my handmaiden.”

He rather visibly scrolled through an internal list of his duties before deciding on a response, which was to say, “I believe she is otherwise engaged,” in his best now-sod-off tone.

“Yeah? Well, she’d better not be, because she works for me.”

His gaze shifted from the air over her left shoulder directly to her and his eyes were as cold as only dead eyes could be. “I don’t.”

“You want to get into it with me? Huh? Right. Let’s get into it.” Lan stepped up and said, “You’re very pretty.”

He backed away.

She pushed forward. “You know the thing about pretty folks? It’s really, really easy to unpretty them. So you’re going to go fetch my handmaiden for me or you’re going to find out what it’s like to have to fall back on personality, and I have to warn you—” She took another step, rising up on her tiptoes to stare him down from an inch away. “They don’t call this the Land of the Beautiful Personalities.”

“All right, all right.” He squirmed away from her and marched off, glaring back over his shoulder to loudly mutter, “Bloody breather.”

“Fucking deadhead.” Lan went back into Azrael’s room to wait. She had time to wish she hadn’t said what she’d said and time to wish she’d said worse and finally, Serafina opened the door. Before her handmaiden could give her opinion of being summoned, Lan said, “What time is it?”

Successfully unpinned, Serafina made a few half-words before managing, “Just after two. What—”

“What time’s dinner?”

“Seven, as always. And I don’t believe you were invited,” Serafina added, recovering herself enough for a haughty sniff. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us have work—”

“I am your work,” Lan interrupted. “You have five hours.”

Serafina tossed her braids, but her brows pinched with curiosity. “To do what?” she asked at last.

Lan opened her arms, scowling. “Dolly me up.”

* * *

Lan could honestly say she’d never looked better than she did that night, but who wouldn’t, after an hour in the bath, two hours in front of the wardrobe and another two hours in a chair getting her face and her hair done to? The last bit probably wouldn’t have taken as long if it was the chair in front of the vanity where Lan usually got her face and hair done, but Master Wickham had come back by then, so Serafina had to do all the final touches in the library, using just what she had brought with her, which was never enough.

But what did Lan get for it? What did she get after she’d been dollied up and taken in her slippery shoes and too-tight corset all the way to the dining hall? She got an empty room, that’s what, or as empty as a room could be with dead people in it. Neither Azrael nor his court was anywhere to be seen. The tables where they normally sat were made up with candles and flowers, but the chairs were all gone, all but the two at the imperial table. Uniformed pikemen lined the walls at full attention, standing watch over nothing; servants kept close with their trays and ewers, waiting on no one. Looking at them, a forgotten slip of memory surfaced: just her mother’s voice, with only the vaguest impression of a face and no hint at all as to time or reason, telling someone a very small Lan couldn’t see, “I’d have set the room on fire just for the excuse to leave it.”

She took her seat next to Azrael’s empty throne and waited while the food was brought. She waited while it all went cold. She waited until she was dead sure he wasn’t coming and she waited until she was equally sure she could accept that without breaking something and finally, she waited until she’d convinced herself she didn’t care. Of course she did care, she cared like fury, but she was a pretty good negotiator when she wanted to be and she could be convincing. So she wouldn’t care, just for now. Later, that was another story. No sense wasting her caring bits on the servants.

To prove how much she didn’t care, she reached over to Azrael’s side of the table and helped herself to his bottle of wine. Nasty stuff. She never had seen the appeal of sour grapes, especially when the fresh ones were so good. She drank it anyway, because she didn’t care. When she got to the end of it, one of the servants brought another, so she drank that one, too. Then it occurred to her that she was drinking an awful lot on an empty stomach, so she started eating. Cold soup, cold fish, cold veg. Ugh. But she ate it and she used a fork and a napkin, even though Azrael wasn’t there to see it. The quiet got under her skin at first, but being stared at by a bunch of dead people wasn’t much different from being stared at by hanging portraits on a wall, and gradually, she forgot they were there. She ate a little, drank a lot, and was just looking over the sweets trolley when the great doors swung open and Azrael walked in with his steward, deep in angry talk that stopped sharp when he saw her.

“Who let her in here?” he demanded, turning on his doormen. “Are your orders not clear? When I have not summoned my companions, they are to remain in their chambers! Remove her at once and be thankful I do not pin you in my garden as a reminder you are my guards and not my whoremongers!”

“Nobody mongers me, mate,” said Lan. “I do my own whoring.”

He swung around, one hand raised to halt the many pikemen who had leapt obediently to throw Lan out on her ass. His head tipped; his mask caught new light and dropped new shadows, taking on an expression Lan, in her not-entirely-sober frame of mind, interpreted as smiling surprise and a friendly wave.

She smiled back. And waved.

“No,” he said, not to her, but in answer to a servile murmur from his steward. He started walking again, his head still at an angle. “No, let her be. You have your orders. Go. Lan?”

“It’s me,” she agreed.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m having dinner with you. Or I would be, if you were here having dinner here with me, which you were not!” she added with a scowl. “No, what you’ve done is put me out on your stoop like a yowling cat and I have put up with it for exactly as long as I’m going to. Mom always said, people can only do to you what you let them do to you, and I decided your shit stops today. So I came to dinner. I got dressed up and everything. Oi!” She held up her cup and shook it until a servant came over to top her off. “Don’t I look nice?”

His step slowed, but only for a moment. “Are you drunk?”

“Getting there.”

“Intentionally?”

“You bet. Been drinking like a dippy bird since I got here and I am easily half-ripped to the giddy tits. And that’s another thing,” she announced, glaring. “You drink every night, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk. What gives?”

“Alcohol is a slow poison. My body heals its damage before it can be much affected.”

“Then why bother drinking?”

“I like the taste.”

“Really?” Lan took a deep swig from her cup, held it in her mouth as long as she could stand it, then swallowed with a grimace. “Still tastes like rotten grapes to me. I don’t think I favor wine. What else you got?”

“For you? Water.”

“Is that a note of disapproval I hear, my lord?” She tried to hold a straight face at the end and couldn’t. Snickering, she banged her cup on the table until the pinch-faced servant came back. “My lord. That sounds so funny when I say it. Doesn’t that sound funny when I say it?”

His only answer was a sullen grunt.

She studied him as he drew nearer, trying to gauge his mood through the mask. She had plenty of time to do it in. The room was so much bigger when it was empty. “Well, never mind. The point is, I was sitting here all alone and I decided to drink. I figured it could either make me feel better or worse. I want to feel better. I can’t feel much worse, thanks to you.” She paused to let him argue if he wanted; he didn’t. “Mom also used to say no one can make you feel anything you don’t want to feel, which only proves she didn’t know everything.”

Still no answer. He ascended the dais and took his seat at the imperial table, already reaching for the wine. The first bottle he tried was empty, but there was enough left in the second to almost fill his cup. He gave her a special sort of stare as he shook out the last drops and the servants shifted behind her, reacting to his mood like dry leaves in a cold wind.

Lan played her way through an assortment of pretend conversation-openers, then gave up and bluntly said, “You want me to go?”

“When I do, I will dismiss you.”

“You didn’t exactly invite me in the first place.”

“True, but you’re here. And since you’re here…” He beckoned the wine-fellow over, took the bottle from his tray and sent him empty-handed back to the wall. With all his attention deceptively fixed upon the bottle as he poured, Azrael calmly said, “It has been brought to my attention that you have been taking your studies out of doors these past days. Out of doors and, indeed, well away from the palace grounds.” He set the bottle down and picked up the cup, staring intently into its depths as if he could see her there, exploring a wine-colored Haven and all its many historic streets. “Are you enjoying your insubordination?”

“Beats lessons.”

His eyes glinted; his cup glowed faintly purple with reflected light. “Is that all you have to say?”

She shrugged. “What do you want to hear?”

“I wish to hear repentance, more fool I. Failing that, I think I ought to hear enthusiasm for the sights you risk your liberty—” His eyes flashed. “—and your life to see. Instead, I hear the same disdain you have always shown when confronted by the splendors of my city. Why is that, Lan?”

“I’m not much for ruins.”

“There was far more ruin under Man’s watch than mine,” he said, almost but not quite growling. “I have cleansed their filth and repaired their corruption. Now, in their ruin, I preserve all that was ever best in Man. A treasury of knowledge and art and history…and treasure, for that matter. Are you not awed and humbled by what you see when you—” He gave the cup a swirl and watched the eddy form. “—steal away from me each day?”

“Balls.” Not the smartest answer, but she couldn’t help herself. “I ‘steal away’ in a car,” she told him. “Driven by the captain of your Revenants, with Master Wickham on the seat beside me. I got someone from the kitchen waiting in the foyer every morning with a packed lunch and if it’s raining, there’s someone else waiting in the evenings with a hot towel and dry shoes. I’m not sneaking anywhere and you know it. You want to tell me not to do it, tell me that, but don’t call me names. Ass.”

“Forgive me,” he said dryly, “for calling you names.” He ran a restless eye over the table, picked a piece of beef off the haunch and threw it down again untasted. “This is cold.”

“You should have been here on time, then, huh?”

“Kitchen!”

The servants rushed to clear the table, taking her plate as well as his. Oh well. At least they left her cup. Lan started to take a drink, found her cup empty, and put out her hand.

He looked at it, at her, and back into his cup. He did not pass the bottle. “I must confess, Lan, when Wickham told me you had adopted his little hobby, I found it difficult to believe. You’ve demonstrated no enthusiasm for Haven’s great design on your prior excursions. Quite the opposite. And yet, I’m told you now go out every day, where,” he added pointedly, “the living are not permitted to wander. Now you will tell me why.”

“You make it sound so sinister. It’s just something to do, that’s all.”

His eye slid toward her, narrow and too bright.

“Maybe not all,” she admitted. “But I can’t…” Her smile slipped. She shored it up, but it felt stretched, too hard. A mask, like his, polished bright to cover the scars beneath. “I can’t sit around all day and wait for you when I know you don’t want to see me.”

He returned his stare to his wine.

“I have to do something,” said Lan. “Even when I know it’s the wrong thing. I can’t just…” Giving up on her empty cup, she pushed it away and took his. He let her, his hand still curled into cup-holding shape around nothing while she drank her nerves quiet.

The servants brought hot soup and apologies, both of which Azrael waved away. As they retreated to their posts along the wall, he said, “Do you wish to leave me?”

“What? No!”

“I will release you if you ask it of me,” he said as if she’d never spoken. “But I will not allow you to escape me. Flee and I will hunt you down, Lan. Even you.”

Down went the cup with a bang on the table. “Damn it, why would you even—? I just barely begged you to take me back, remember? Remember me begging?”

“I remember a please.”

“Do you want to fight?” she demanded. “Do you? You’ve been ignoring me for days and I’ve been drinking all night. I am down for it, mate.”

The stiff set of his shoulders held another moment, then fell. “No, Lan,” he said and rubbed his scars beneath the mask. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Good. Because…because I don’t want to fight either. Not really.” She passed him his cup as a peace offering and when he finally took it, she said, “I know you said I wasn’t supposed to go out, but I honestly thought you were okay with it as long as I had someone with me. You’re not and that’s fine. If you really don’t want me out there, I won’t go, okay?”

He scratched at the gold on the rim of his cup. “As simple as that?”

“Yeah, well…I got some books. I’ll stay in my room and read them. I’ll be bored as hell, but I’ll live.”

He looked at her. “Books?”

“Relax, nothing insubordinate. It’s not even storybooks. Books on buildings.”

“Buildings.” He did not seem appeased. If anything, his eyelight intensified. “The buried temples of Ethiopia, perhaps? The Chand Baori well? The floating city of Venice?”

“Mostly just the ones here. In fact, that’s where I’ve been going every day, not that you’ve asked,” she added. “For someone so concerned about where I’m going and who I’m doing…never mind. I’m not fighting. My point is, all I’ve done is look at some buildings.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Haven has a very diverse, uh…architectural…something. Ask Wickham. He could tell you all about it.” She took his wine away since he hadn’t touched it and drank it herself. “Lord knows, he tells me.”

“Do you favor any particular school of design?”

“I haven’t seen any schools yet, just a bunch of churches and pubs and palaces. Do you have any idea,” she asked, staring at him solemnly over the rim of his cup, “how many palaces there are in Haven?”

“Four, surviving.”

“No.” She blinked. “Hell, no, even. There has to be more than that.”

“A palace, by definition, must be a royal residence. You cannot call just any estate a palace merely because it appears sufficiently lavish.” He took his cup back. “Wickham should have taught you that.”

“I’m sure he’ll get around to it,” Lan said, watching him drink. “Do you know the difference between a column and a pilaster?”

“No.”

“I do,” she said glumly. “You may add to the list of things you did not know about Master Wickham that the man is fuck-wild about columns.”

“Noted. Tell me, Lan, and tell me the truth.” He spoke calmly, almost disinterestedly, but his eyes had begun to brighten in their sockets. “When you go out into my city by day, are you looking for the path of the escape you will take when you leave me by night?”

“I’m not the one who leaves people in the middle of the night.”

His jaw clenched, but his eyes dimmed. “No,” he said after a moment’s silence. “I suppose you’re not. So be it. Go where you will then, upon two conditions.” He took a drink and gazed again into its depths. “The first: Cross my borders even once, for any reason, and I will put you in chains the rest of your life. No excuses. No forgiveness.” He looked at her at last and his eyes were cold and distant as stars. “You. Will. Die. In chains.”

Lan shrugged. “And the second?”

He held his stare another moment or two before that awful light first fluttered, then failed. He looked back into his cup. “Tell me where you go. Tell me what you see.”

“You sure? That hasn’t worked out too well for us so far.”

He didn’t answer.

“Okay,” she said uncertainly. “Okay, so the first time Master Wickham took me out—for real, I mean—he took me to see this one house. Or a palace, I think. Whatever. The chimneys there were just…amazing. You don’t use words like that on a chimney, but these chimneys were. They were made out of bricks, like everything there, but they were all braided up or woven, like nothing I knew you could do with bricks. And each one was different from the others. They were stood up there in a row, four of them, like four little brick…” She groped for a word and found one, a dumb one. “…princesses.”

Azrael grunted and scratched at his cup.

“But here’s the thing,” said Lan, leaning toward him. “We had to look at them with binoculars. There was no place to see them from the ground, not really. Someone had built them like that, to be on the roof and be just…so pointlessly beautiful. And then we went inside,” she continued, spreading her arms wide, “and everything was like that. Not just the walls and the ceiling and the windows, but the…the doorknobs, the hinge plates! Everything was prettied up, even worse than it is here, some of it.”

“Worse.”

She fell quiet, picking at the edge of the table.

“Even worse, you say,” he mused. His thumbclaw dug at a groove in the side of the cup and slowly scratched up a thin curl of gold. “Humans are, I know, prone to adopt perverse attitudes when in captivity. They hate the squalor of their little lives without these walls, but hate even more the beauty that must be bestowed upon them when they believe they are entitled to it already. So they are all like you in the beginning, determined to take no pleasure and covet nothing while in the devil’s domain. Fair becomes foul, foul becomes fair. I understand. I sympathize. I have done much the same in my time.” He shrugged one shoulder, even as his claws flexed. “But I do wonder…if I were not here to be impressed by your defiance, would you continue to scorn Haven’s many luxuries or simply seize them?”

“I’m not scorning it, at least I don’t think I am, but…oh hell, I’m never going to see this place like you do,” she said helplessly. “I’m never going to love it. Or want it. Nothing I have to say about it is ever going to make you happy.” She tipped her head, trying to catch his eye; he wouldn’t look at her. “Like that church I went to, the one…west of here?”

“Westminster.”

“That’s the one. The one where you saw stars and I saw dots. And that? That’s all you need to know about what I see in Haven. It’s beautiful,” she said, taking his cup back for courage. “The streets are clean and every window’s washed and it’s so fucking beautiful, it kind of hurts the eye after a while, but it’s not my city. And it’s not yours. It’s…” She had a sip, thinking. “It’s a museum. You know what that is?”

His eyes flickered. “Yes.”

“Master Wickham took me a few days back.” She shook her head, shutting out those memories. “I couldn’t stay more than a minute. All that dead time, all in one place. And you built a city out of it. Not even a real city, just a city-shaped—” She caught herself about to say ‘dollhouse’ and said instead, lamely, “—thing.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry.”

He roused himself at last enough to look at her. “For?”

“I’m sorry I can’t love it,” she said. “I’ve tried. I know you don’t believe me, but I have tried.”

His expression, what there was of it through the mask, did not change. “Why?”

“Because you want me to. And I want to make you happy, you know. I’m not pathologically ungrateful for the fun of it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who said that?”

Lan blinked. “I did.”

“Who, before you?”

She thought, shrugged, and had another drink. “I don’t remember. Probably Serafina. Sounds like something she’d say. You know she spent five hours putting me together like this and you still haven’t told me how nice I look.”

He did not acknowledge his cue.

“And you’re not going to, are you?” Lan plucked at the front of her bodice and glowered into her wine-colored reflection in the bottom of their shared cup. “I never was any good at making plans. I just do whatever stupid thing comes into my head and I’m always surprised when it doesn’t come off.”

His gaze, already narrow, sharpened. “Plans?”

“Yeah. I had a plan for tonight. I had things I wanted to say to you. I found that dragon you don’t believe in and I was going to fix everything, but now I can’t, because I’m drunk and it’s all your fault.”

He took the wine away from her, but accepted his blame with a mild, “All right.”

“It is true, you know. If you weren’t so late getting here, I wouldn’t have been so drunk and it would have gone better. Also, you’re being a mopey ass. You’d think you’d be more cheerful after what you’ve been doing all afternoon.”

His practiced indifference cracked, letting slip a sliver of confusion before he patched it up again. “What is it you imagine I’ve been doing?”

“Her.”

“Her?”

“Oh, don’t even—Her! Your new bird, the one you’ve thrown me over for. Cassius.”

She’d caught him mid-swallow; he actually choked a little. “Cassius?” he echoed, frowning. “Cassius of the lean and hungry look?”

Virtually the same words, scrambled slightly out of order, that Master Wickham had used. Lan’s sense of triumph deflated. “Yeah?”

Azrael looked away at nothing. “Wickham,” he said, so softly it was nearly a growl.

“It’s not her name?”

“No. She calls herself Chloe. Neither is that her name,” he added. “She told me as much when she first stood before me. She said it would be the only lie she ever told me. That, too, was a lie…but she doesn’t know I know that. Cassius…” He touched a claw to the arm of his throne and scraped it slowly up and down, carving thin curls of wood from a groove that was, she saw, already well-established. “For my part, I have walked about the streets, submitting me unto the perilous night, and, thus unbraced, I did present myself.” His claw tapped twice. “Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat. Hungry Cassius. Hm.”

Lan had no idea what to say to any of that, so she said, “Tell me about her.”

Azrael grunted, still sunk in his thoughts. “She gives in too easily.”

“She’s supposed to,” she reminded him, unsure whether it was a joke, but unable to suppress a smile, because what sort of johnny complained about that? “She’s your dollygirl.”

“So are you,” he countered in that same grim, distracted way. “Yet you have never given in, never once. You give everything but that.”

It was a compliment, she decided, and like all his compliments, it left her with a hateful feeling of vulnerability. “What’s she like?” she demanded, determined to stab Cassius back into the conversation and keep her there.

Azrael glanced at her and back into his wine. “What are you like?”

“I’m…” Lan looked down at herself and around at the room, but found no clues. What was there to say about herself? Some women were blondes or brunettes, had raven tresses or fiery ones; Lan had hair. Her eyes were nothing special. She didn’t know how to describe her face. Hell, Azrael knew what she looked like. He was looking at her right now. In some frustration, she said the first three things that came to mind: “I’m from Norwood. I used to farm peaches. I don’t like dogs.”

“She’s from Balehurst. Her family produced flax and honey. The subject of dogs never arose. I’ll have to ask.”

‘While you’re at it, ask when the hell they started growing flax in Balehurst,’ thought Lan, but she didn’t say it. The Devil’s advocate in her kept trying to say there might be two Balehursts. Beyond the small radius of Norwood’s trade routes was a great unknown. She had purchased monthly deliveries of food for dozens of villages and towns whose names were entirely alien to her. The world might be filled with Balehursts and no one would ever know.

“It couldn’t have been a bad bite,” said Azrael, bringing her out of thoughts that had begun to stretch dangerously out into an empty landscape where only the dead walked.

“Huh?”

“The dog,” he said, like that was an explanation. “I have seen every inch of your body. There are no scars left by a dog’s bite.”

“Am I drunk or are you?” Lan asked, genuinely confused. “I never said I was bit. I never was.”

“Were there many dogs in Norwood?”

“A few, I guess. Mostly mongrels kept out by the wall. They were supposed to bark if there were Eaters around. And they did, but mostly they were there for the boys on watch to play with so they wouldn’t get bored and sneak off. And Timmus had an old terrier to keep the weasels out of his henyard, but it died when I was still little.” The next bit caught in her throat and the pause was as good as a beacon. She knew it and still tried to say it like it didn’t matter: “The sheriff had a couple deerhounds.”

His eyes narrowed. “Did they hunt?”

“Of course. They were deerhounds.”

“Did you see them hunt? Did you ever see them take down a deer? Did they bark at you with blood on their jaws? Jump at you?”

“No. They were very well-behaved.”

“Ah.” He smiled. “That must be why you hated them.”

She couldn’t see it, but she knew there was an insult in there somewhere and it hurt when it hit.

His smile faded as she sat silent beside him. He said, “I don’t like them either,” and had another drink.

“Were you bit?” Lan asked listlessly.

“No. My flesh would seem to be repellant to all beasts. I have never been bitten, nor stung, nor scratched. Even the rats they set against my belly in an iron cage chose to burn under the coals they heaped on it rather than burrow into me. In all my life, I have feared no wild creature, but only dogs. They alone have hunted me.” His claws dug at the sides of his cup as he gazed pensively into the dark mirror of his wine. “I know deerhounds. I know the sound of their baying when they have you. I know that high, mindless, cringing cry, for even when they do not wish to catch what they pursue, it gives them so much joy to hunt for their masters. The very worst of dogs are those who are the very best behaved.”

In the quiet that followed, he glanced at her, sighed, and suddenly it was like there were two Azraels and one of them just…dropped away. He reached out, not quite touching her cheek, but close enough that she could feel the chill of it on her skin. “It’s good to see you, Lan,” he told her. “If it doesn’t seem so, it is only because I so mistrust…how good it is to see you.”

She tried to put her hand over his, to close that last small distance and make him touch her, but he lowered his arm before she could get there, leaving her with her hand up and foolishly empty.

“Enough,” he said, more to himself than to her. “We will say no more of that. And no more, I say, of Cassius. She is nothing, a shadow. You are with me now. You, who are my light.”

She rolled her eyes, but some stupid, secret part of her did indeed glow.

“But to answer your accusation, no,” he went on, settling back into his throne, at last looking as though he belonged there and wasn’t just looking for a reason to leave. “I wasn’t with her. I have not spoken with her since the morning meal. You saw me with Felicity.” He paused to reflect, muttering afterward into his cup, “Her mother was no prophet.”

“Is she sweet?” Lan asked, too casually.

“Felicity?” He chuckled, the sound amplified and deepened by the wine. “No.”

“She didn’t look sweet.”

“Neither do you.”

“And I’m not, am I?”

“You have your odd moments.”

That silly glow again.

“Felicity is not in the habit of overtaking me with lustful advances,” he was saying, “and she’s hardly one to provoke them. She requested an audience and you merely happened upon us at its conclusion.”

“What’s she want?”

“She has a garden with a small pond and she would like swans.”

“Swans,” Lan echoed, but he seemed to be serious. “What the hell for?”

“To swim in the pond in her garden. Naturally.”

Lan didn’t know from swans, but she knew geese and as far as she could tell, the only difference was posture. And geese were, bar none, the smelliest, noisiest, shittingest birds in Britain. She could not begin to fathom why anyone would want to keep them around if they didn’t need the eggs and her confusion must have showed, because he smiled again.

“Felicity can never be happy,” he told her. “There is a very real possibility she was cursed at her christening. But if a pair of swans can at least quiet the deep unhappiness she endures in Haven, so be it. It costs me nothing.”

“How many have you got?”

He looked at her in some surprise. “Swans?”

“Dollygirls, I meant.”

“Presently?’

Lan braced herself. “Yeah.”

“Twelve, apart from you.”

She supposed she should feel relieved it wasn’t more. She didn’t. But he was watching and even if she didn’t know what she was feeling, she was somehow sure he did. To hide it, whatever ‘it’ was, she tossed off a shrug and said, “Unlucky number, thirteen.”

“Mm. There’s also Chloe, although we’ve not entered a true contract yet.”

Yet. Dicky word, that. Yet.

“Why not?”

His smile twisted inward and became bitter. “Were I you, I would say you’d ruined me.”

“Me?”

“You. The mark by which I have come to measure the living.” He glanced at her. His eyes lingered, dimming, before they turned away. “And find them wanting.”

“Is that a compliment?” she asked uncertainly.

“No.”

“Oh. Well…how many have you had?” Lan asked. “In all, I mean.”

He didn’t ask why she wanted to know or even if she was sure she did, he only looked up at the ceiling as he counted them up. “Four hundred…fifty-three.”

“That many,” she said, not meaning to say anything. She’d known it would be a lot, but even her most masochistic estimates had not run so high. She tried to picture them—a crowd equivalent to six Norwoods—all young and beautiful with ribbons in their hair and jewels on their corsets. “How many did you keep?”

“Keep?” The side of his mouth twitched up. “You imply…what, exactly? I cast them out when they bore me?”

“When you’re done with them, yeah.” It wasn’t a deliberate jab, but she saw it hit all the same and it made her sort of a little sorry. “Who would ever leave all this, if they had a choice?” she asked, waving at the high windows and glittering lights of the dining hall in an attempt to soften the edge of her words.

“They don’t.” He pushed his throne back and drew his hand downward, displaying the ravaged landscape of his chest. “They leave this.”

She sat a moment, then reached out and touched him.

The sound of half a dozen servants all taking an unneeded breath was not loud at all, but it made the candles on the table gutter. Azrael turned an amused eye their way, then leaned back to watch Lan’s hand following the path he’d indicated. She took her time with it, tracing old scars and young ones, reading ages of pain by Braille until her fingertips brushed the silver rings that closed the gruesome gash over his side. The skin growing up around the rings was thin and smooth, warmer than the rest of him. It should have felt like real skin—human skin—but it didn’t. Even so…

“You’re not that bad,” she said.

He gave her a narrow stare and a crooked smile.

“I didn’t mean it like ‘You’re not that bad.’ I meant ‘You’re not that bad.’” But she took her hand back, so awful was the feel of that newgrown skin among his scars. “Anyway, I know some of them are still here, so…where are they all?”

“Are you afraid you might open some forbidden door and find them hanging from hooks?”

“Not until now.”

He studied her for some time, still smiling, but never quite lost that searching stare. At length, he said, “Two of them cook. One plays the flute in my orchestra. Three work in my greenhouses and another tends the palace gardens. Additionally, there are five who, like Felicity, make themselves available upon my request, but otherwise have nothing more to do with me.”

“Do you miss them?”

“I remember them.”

“But do you miss them?” she pressed. “When you see the lady who plays the flute, do you ever think—”

He laughed convincingly. “No.”

“Seems like you watch her pretty close when she comes to play.”

“She’s talented.”

“I’ll bet. Is that why you don’t let her go?” Lan asked and winked. “Because she’s so talented?”

“She doesn’t wish to go.”

“Is that what she tells you? Or what you tell her?”

“Shall I summon her?” he offered, plucking at her corset ties, but not cutting them. “She could answer these questions better than I.”

“Yeah, right, answer questions. And hey, as long as she’s here—”

He laughed, both with humor and with bitterness. “No.”

“Balls. I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

“No, Lan. You’ve seen the way I listen. My musicians, practiced as they are, yet can do no more than play notes on a page. She, alone of all my orchestra, makes music.”

It was not a rebuke. Nevertheless, Lan ducked her head as she thought of her one and only music lesson. “I reckon I could give it another go,” she said sourly, “if that’s what you want.”

“You needn’t.” He started to drink, then shrugged. “You shouldn’t. True music can only come from those who feel it. You may eventually learn to play it, but not, I think, to love it. Ah, but no matter. You have your own talents.”

Encouraged, Lan got up (the floor wobbled a bit, but stabilized quickly) and went to him. It seemed a very long way to go for one step and only once there did she discover there wasn’t enough room between him and the table for her to slither in.

He watched her tug ineffectively at the arm of his throne for several seconds before he finally said, “What are you doing?”

“Sitting on your lap.”

“Hm.” He pushed his throne back at an angle, allowing her to settle without giving her any help, and to be honest, she could have used it. “Now what are you doing?” he inquired, steadying her with one hand on her back. Just the one. Just her back.

She put her mouth close to his ear and in her sultriest voice, the one that didn’t at all sound like a pig with a sore throat no matter what stupid Eithon Fairchild said, whispered, “You, johnny. I’m doing you.”

He caught her wrist as she groped at his belt. “You’re drunk, Lan.”

“No, I’m not. Just nicely lubricated.” Again, she reached.

Again, he stopped her. “Not tonight.”

“Oh, come on!” she groaned, slapping in frustration at his shoulder. “It’s been forever!”

“Then it can wait another day, surely.”

“I don’t want to wait! I want you!” For the third time, she went for his belt and for the third time, was firmly rebuffed. “Don’t be so bloody noble!”

He gave her one of those half-laughing grunts and had himself another drink of wine, muttering, “There’s more flattery I’ve not heard before,” into his cup.

Lan plucked grumpily at his golden collar. “Bet if your bloody flute-player were here, you’d do her.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” he said, unruffled.

“Balls.”

“I’ll not claim I’ve never enjoyed her, but my touch—”

“Don’t even say it.”

He paused, then finished, “—lingers on in her music. I find the scars I leave displeasing to hear.”

“Are you sure you don’t miss her?”

“Are you jealous?” His hand moved in stroking motions along the small of her back, strumming at her corset stays. “Tell me you are.”

“I am, a little,” she said ruefully. “Do you think she’s pretty?”

“I think you are beautiful.”

“Did you ever tell her that?”

He shrugged, his hand still moving slowly up and down, up and down. “Yes.”

“Did you tell them all?”

“In their own way, they all are.”

“Oh yeah? What’s my way?” she challenged. “Tell me how I’m beautiful, Azrael. Tell me what you’ve never told any of them. And tell me the truth. I can hear lies too, you know.”

“I believe you.” He leaned back as far as he could go, studying her through his mask, and smiled. “How are you beautiful? You are…two unflinching eyes and the chin where you carry all your stubbornness. You are the blush you never admit to and that rebel lock of hair you are forever pushing back. You are the throat that arches and the lower lip you bite to keep from moaning…just before you moan anyway. You are my Lan and you are radiant.”

“More than your flute-girl?”

“More than,” he agreed.

“More than Cassius?”

She didn’t mean to say it, except she sort of did, and she had plenty of time to regret it in the minute that he sat motionless and silent, gazing at her without readable expression. She thought she couldn’t feel any worse about it and then he looked away, so she guessed she was wrong. “I’m not mean,” she mumbled, hooking her littlest finger through one of the silver rings in his side and making the others jingle. “I’m just very, very drunk.”

“What would you have me do with her, Lan?”

The question pierced her; the wound was cold. “You can do what you want.”

“And I will,” he agreed. “But what would that be, if you had your way of it? If the fate of hungry Cassius were yours to decide, what would you?”

She didn’t know what to tell him and didn’t want to think about it too much. “I’d feed her,” she said at last. She did not say, ‘And then move her the hell on,’ but she thought he probably heard it anyway, because he grunted in that almost-laughing way. Annoyed, Lan leaned out for the bottle of wine—sensing disapproval, she offered it, but he shook his head—and had a pull straight from the neck. “How many dollies do you need, anyway?”

“Always one more.”

“Goat.”

“I? I did not summon her to my court.”

“You let her in.”

“Has she not as much right to stand before me as you?” he asked, not arguing, but only asking. It was beginning to bother her just how unaffected he seemed to be. “She might have walked as far, risked and fought and lost as much, or more. What monster would turn her out after so much suffering?”

“I don’t want you to turn her out, I just want her not to be here. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?” Lan played with the neck of the wine bottle, avoiding his eyes. “You know, I keep saying I don’t care how many dollies you’ve got, but I’m starting to think I don’t mean it.”

“She won’t stay.”

“That’s what Master Wickham says.”

“Does he?” Azrael made a sound somewhere between a growl and a laugh, both honest. “Well, he would know.”

“He doesn’t like her,” said Lan, because she was drunk.

“Mm.”

“Do you like her?”

“Emotions can so muddy the simple business of bedding one’s concubines. I prefer my relationships be kept purely professional.”

“Do you like me?”

“Well,” he said after a short pause. “I set that trap and walked right into it.”

“Answer me,” she insisted in a quavering voice. “What am I to you? The…the professional? Or the mud?”

He sighed, rubbing under his mask with one hand and at her hip with the other for several long minutes. “If I send her away,” he said finally, “would that be worth something?”

“Like what?”

“One year. In its fullness. Swear that you will eat at my table and sleep in my bed and press me for no further audience, and I will see that woman fed and provisioned and sent away this minute. I will not remove those to whom I have promised refuge, but I will have them housed elsewhere in Haven and for so long as you keep your word, I will take no other in. Agreed?”

One year. The whole year, and every day one more day she had to take baths and use napkins and wear gowns while alive people died and dead ones ate them and no one did anything about it. One year lost, but every night, safe in his bed. In his arms. One year.

“No,” said Lan.

He showed no surprise, no disappointment. He merely nodded.

“I’m not being very consistent, am I?” She tried to laugh. It wasn’t a very good effort. She had another drink. She was a lot better at that. “I swear I’m not doing it on purpose, except I sort of am.”

He hooked a claw under her chin and tipped her head back so that she had to look at him and see his smile. “You are first in my favor, Lan, and for so long as you consent to remain, you will always be first…but you will not always consent to remain. I have to think of the future.”

“I offered you mine. You didn’t want it.”

His face closed. “I have told you, Lan, we do not speak of that night.”

“Why didn’t you want it, Azrael?”

He gave her a nudge meant to move her off onto her own chair again. She refused to move. There was a bad moment when she thought he might pick her up and put her aside (in her present state, that possibility took on portentous weight, that if he did it, he wasn’t just doing it here, but everywhere, in every way), but when he reached, it was not for her, only for the bottle. He took a long drink and put it down on the table where she couldn’t take it back. His arm around her waist was relaxed and easy; his other hand rested on the arm of his throne, scratching and scratching at the paint.

“I reckon that’s my answer, then,” said Lan, watching curls of gold flake up under his claws.

He frowned, but did not look at her.

“I’m your dolly. Just your dolly.” She repeated it a few times, getting used to the taste, and had to laugh, if only to keep from crying. “Mom would be so disgusted with me.”

“Ah, Lan…”

“Were you tempted?” she asked in a cracking voice. “Even a little? Tell me you were, even if you weren’t. Just so I don’t feel like so much of a fool. I promise I’ll never bring it up again if you just tell me you were tempted.”

He was silent a long, long time. Then, in a voice like death itself, he said, “The first night you slept in my bed…in my arms…I looked down on you as you dreamed and felt your breath on my skin and thought how trusting you were. How foolish and fearless. How soft. And I was tempted then. I have never harmed one of those who came to my bed, never before considered it, but I touched your lips and thought how easily I might steal your breath away…and raise you up again before you ever knew you’d died.” He moved his hand over her stomach in a circle just once—she felt an odd, cold pulling sensation, as if he’d found some secret thread inside her and wound it once around his wrist—then came to rest on her hip. “And I would have you forever.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Again, silence, stretching out until she had to fight not to break it herself.

“You wept,” he said at last. He said it mildly enough, but she could feel the tension in his body, even if he didn’t show it. “And when I brushed your tears away, you put your arm around my neck.”

She waited, but that appeared to be it.

“A small thing,” he admitted. “Lasting only a few seconds, no more. And I realized then that I have had a hundred women in that bed, but never so honest a touch. After all the years of my life, that was my best moment.” His eyes dimmed to almost perfect blackness. “Your hand on my neck.”

She raised her hand and brought it to rest at the hollow of his throat. She smiled. He didn’t.

“It was the first time I ever felt like a man. Not a monster. Not a conquering god. Only a man, lying with his woman, watching her sleep. I think back to that moment often. Often. But it always comes braided with that first impulse. Just as all my memories of that night, the night we will not speak of, must come braided with you asking me to murder you…and I, tempted.”

She couldn’t look at him, so she reached out for the bottle.

He moved it further away. “No more of that, my Lan. I am not angry. The night is not soured that ends in your company. Bittersweet, at worst.” He brushed his fingertips across her lips and brought them to his own, smiling just a little as he tasted. “My favorite flavor.”

She had to smile back, had to, even though her eyes burned on the edge of tears. “I know you’re trying to be dovey and all, but that’s been in my mouth, that has. Do you know the sorts of things I do with my mouth?”

“Ah, so well do I know.” He leaned in a little and for one dizzying moment, she thought he might actually kiss her. On his own, so to speak, instead of waiting for her to do it and trying to push her off a few times first. But no, he was only shifting her weight on his thigh, it seemed, because he leaned back again, putting even more distance between them than had been there before, even if he was smiling. “Why did you come tonight, Lan? I admit I’m glad you did…however reluctantly…but I will know why. Plans, you said. Plans that took—” He tapped a claw off the neck of the bottle. “—courage to present. Tell me.”

“You would ask me now. I’m pissed, man.” But she didn’t say no. Instead, with a sigh, she got up and moved back to her chair, raising her voice to say, “Can I get some coffee?”

One of the servants ducked out and came back almost immediately with a tray already made up, just like they’d been waiting all night for her to ask. She was of half a mind to be insulted, but the other half was jiggered, so she took it without comment, because this was the important thing, this was the bit that mattered, and she needed to have her head on.

“It’s a dumb idea,” she began. “You’ll think it’s naive and it would never work and you’ll probably also think I’m a bit of a fool for suggesting it, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say so out loud.”

“You have my word I’ll refuse gently.”

“You have to promise to hear it all the way through.”

“Agreed.”

“And you have to promise not to say no tonight. You have to think about it at least until tomorrow.”

He acknowledged that with a lordly wave of one hand, and when she opened her mouth, he said, “You built Haven. Why not leave and build another?”

Her mouth stayed open, stupidly gaping in dismay.

“It is naive,” Azrael told her, but he said it gently, just like he’d promised. “And it will not work. But you are not a fool to suggest it. I’m only surprised it’s taken you this long to ask.”

“I didn’t know you had anyone around who could do the job until recently. You can’t just knock up a row of houses and call it done. Well, you can,” she corrected. “Plenty do. Norwood was that way. Daub-and-wattle walls, thatch roof, dirt cellars, and solar charging stations to keep the ferries running and the pumps working in the well. Just like plenty try to live in the old ruins, even though the sewers flood out and the roads fall in and every year, babies are born without eyes or hands, because who-knows-what has been soaking into the ground. It’s one thing to take a place like Haven and keep it running. It’s something else to build it.”

“You give me too much credit. My ascension was not without violence. I merely repaired what I could of the damage.”

“See, I’d believe that if I hadn’t slept in the Red Room.”

He cocked his head at her and when that failed to produce an explanation, said, “I think I must be missing your meaning.”

“The Red Room is at the top of a tower,” she told him. “And that tower has no business being there. I’ve seen pictures of the old palace. There never was a tower.”

“The North Wing was destroyed and had to be restored.”

“And you restored it with a tower?”

He rolled one shoulder. “Call me a romantic. If I’d known how difficult they were to construct or how largely useless they are in function, I would not have bothered. As it is, the palace stands as a rare success among many failures. So many, I did not see fit to finish Haven’s restoration. I did only what I had to do to make the city safe to inhabit.”

“Now you’re just straight-up lying to me,” she said, ignoring the sudden flaring of his eyes. “What about all the other buildings, the ones with all the shiny glass, and all the chip shops and garages and offices and such? Those are just gone, whether they were broken in the war or not. You didn’t need them and you didn’t like the looks of them, so you brought them down and let me tell you, that’s even trickier than putting them up, especially with them all stacked together, nuts to butts. If building was doctoring, that would be surgery! That would be twice the surgery, in fact, because you put new things up and made them look like they’d always been there.”

“I did nothing. And the surgeons, as you would call them, are long gone. I would not know now where to find them.”

“They’re in the library,” she informed him. “And it took Master Wickham all of an hour to hunt them up.” She swallowed some coffee without pleasure. Too sweet. Starting to cool off. She drank it anyway, wiped her mouth and eyed the wine bottle. “We talked a bit, them and me, about the building of Haven. I admit I didn’t understand everything they said, but I got the broad strokes and the broadest stroke of all is this: They did it once and they can do it again. So I say we go.”

“Abandon Haven. Abandon the home I fought for, the home I provide for my people.”

“What was that you said? You said something once…give me a second…” Lan squeezed her eyes shut, thinking back through wine-colored thoughts, and haltingly said, “What is it to me…but a heap of bricks…and a roof over my head?”

He grunted sourly and had a drink, muttering, “Near enough.”

“You don’t like it here. Maybe it’s true you wanted it once, but you never liked it. When was the last time you even left the palace? This is not your home, Azrael,” she insisted as he looked away, “but it’s not too late to have one.”

“Where?” he asked. “Because no matter how long abandoned, when word finds a living ear that Azrael and his undead have claimed another ruin, they will come to take it from me.”

“You’re probably right, but who says we have to live in ruins? We can build a place, brand new, just for us. Only this time, don’t make it look quite so grand. No electric lights. No colored glass windows. No creepy little winged babies hanging off of every corner. Tell your building-blokes to make it look a little rundown, a little dirty. It doesn’t have to be a palace, does it? It can be a town. Just a town. Towns can be good places.”

“It will be found,” he said with just a hint of frustration. “No matter how remote, how small, how well-hidden, the living will come. And when they do—”

“We’ll sell ‘em a mug of ale and a bowl of stew and move ‘em on in the morning,” she interrupted. “Don’t you get it? It will look like every other town, with not enough food and not enough livestock to feed all the people who already live there. Just another town full of starving, mistrustful people…who might be a bit prettier than you find elsewhere, but otherwise, just people. The ferryman who brought me here was a dead man and I never knew it until I—eh, that’s not important,” she said, and as Azrael smiled faintly, she went hurriedly on. “You’re the only one we’ll have to hide, but as long as you don’t post your Revenants in full uniform outside your door, that should be easy enough to do. I passed through a dozen towns where I never saw the mayor. Important folk as that never meet with any old johnny off the road.”

“You aren’t thinking clearly.” He tapped his eyes at the cup they shared. “I can’t imagine why.” Back to her. “If you were, you would perhaps realize there are nearly ten thousand people in Haven. How am I to move them unseen?”

“You don’t have to. Crops blight. Walls break. Revenants come.” Lan shrugged. “Folk are used to seeing long lines of strangers trudging down the road every now and then. As long as we go at it in small lots, a hundred or so, we’re not going to raise any hackles. The only thing they’re likely to do is shut their village gate until we’ve all passed by. Once that first group finds a likely place to start building, we send the next batch. We’ll have to be careful, sure, but I can’t see it taking more than a year.”

“Your innocence is showing, Lan.”

Startled, she checked the front of her bodice, but everything appeared to be in order.

“No,” he said patiently. “I mean it is clear you have lived all your life behind walls with no understanding of what it takes to erect them. It is the work of several years to lay the foundation of such a town, years just to quarry the stone. Such an endeavor would attract attention long before it was completed.”

“Now you’re just making excuses. All we need to start is a place for your dollies to bed down and a greenhouse to start growing food. What’s it matter to you how long the rest takes? You’ve got time.”

“Yes, I do. I have time and I have had time, ages of time, more than Men can easily measure or even name. And if my time has taught me nothing else, it has taught me there can be no peace with the living.”

“Well, then just say that,” said Lan crossly. “Don’t pretty it up with fake reasons about moving and foundations, just say, ‘I am a giant jackhat and I hate the living and if I came across one burning in the bloody street, I wouldn’t piss on him to put him out.’”

“Lan.”

“No, that’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You won the war and winners don’t do the leaving, so fuck ‘em all, you’re staying. You hate it here,” she added, ignoring the flash of his eyes, “but they hate that you’re here even more and that’s what counts.”

“You’re drunk, Lan.”

“Yeah, well, you’re bloody-minded and spiteful and I’ll be sober in the morning.”

Behind her, more sensed than seen, one of the servants set down his tray and slipped away. The others rapidly followed, actually bottlenecking at the door in their silent haste to get out ahead of the impending explosion. Azrael watched them go, then turned a brooding eye on Lan. “You’re a terrible diplomat.”

“Oh yeah? Well, you’re a terrible…git! And you’ve got funny eyes!”

“One would think you would do all in your power to sweeten your proposal. Instead, you harangue me with another of your demands, without, I note, releasing me from the first.” He gave her a moment with that, his eyes flaring brighter in her mutinous silence. “And you’ve no intention, have you? If I told you I would build your town tomorrow on the promise that you would never again speak of ending my hungering dead, you’d say—”

“No, damn it!” Lan slapped the table, narrowly missing her coffee cup. “I’m showing you a chance at a real home, here! You don’t build it to shut me up, you build it because you want to build it! Because you believe in it!”

Gone in an instant was his last pretense of calm. He tore the mask from his head with violence enough that the strap cut across his scalp and slammed it down on the table, one hand cutting upward to point at the ruin of his face. “This is what I believe in,” he snarled. “This is the home Men have made for me! I’ll not reward them with Haven while I slink away! I will burn this city and salt the ashes before I leave one brick of it standing for the living to take back!”

“Why stop there?” she demanded. “Why not finish the job? But wait, who are you going to punish when there’s no one left to lip off to your Revenants or burn your Eaters or…build a house or plant a tree…or hold hands or have babies or just live their damn lives! Will you finally be happy once you’ve avenged yourself on the hundreds of people who ever hurt you by killing all of us?”

“I hope so.”

If he’d said it angrily, hatefully…if he’d shouted or cursed or thrown his cup at her…but no, he just said it, like it hardly even mattered. Her mind reeled, grasping for arguments, but found no gripping place in his indifference.

“You want to end the world,” she said at last. “You really do. You…How could you?”

“The world? No. Only Man. And what does it matter, one species more or less? If humanity’s history had but one voice, it would tell you the loss of this or that creature before its natural time, while tragic on a sentimental level, is nevertheless insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things. Man may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.” His smile thinned. “Would you like to know how?”

“No.”

“Animals will swell to fill the void left by Men,” he told her. “And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. These ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this—” He waved at the walls. “—and this—” He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. “—forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by his fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under an uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the world will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.” His mouth curved into a bitter line. “But I’ll live.”

“Stop it,” Lan whispered through numb lips.

“I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I will continue to endure…my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream…still alive.”

“Stop it!” she shouted and had to clap both hands over her eyes suddenly to keep them from flooding. “Stop it, just stop it, just shut up and…please…stop.”

He did. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but whatever it was, he did it quietly. With her own shuddering breath in her ears, she couldn’t hear him at all and gradually became convinced he had left. When she dared to lower her hands and look, he was still there, cup in hand, watching her.

“So,” he said in what was almost his normal tone, “I have that to look forward to. Until then, it falls to me, as to even the least of Men, to determine how I will live. After all my years of running, hiding…dying…I have decided I would rather live in an empty world than one in which I am forever hunted. You could show me a castle in the sky, unreachable by human hands, and promise me ten thousand years of peace within its golden walls, but I am not running, Lan. Not one step more. Not one. I am here and if Men are fool enough to pursue me here, then here is where I will end them. All of them.”

Outside, because the world had a sick sense of sympathy, it began to rain. Drops like bullets hit the windows, first one after another, then drumming down faster, filling up the vast space between them with noise.

“I really thought I had it, you know,” Lan said at last. “I could see it, Azrael. I could see all those houses laid out in rows. Fields. Windmills. Smoke in the chimneys. Goats on the roofs. But you know…I never saw people. Not even in my own head. Not me. Not you. Deep down, I reckon I still knew you can’t start over.” She thought about it and had to laugh. “My mother used to say that. You can’t start over, you can only move on.”

“Hm.”

“Yeah. You would have liked her. She never had any hope either.”

He took a breath as if he might argue, then only let it out again. He drank his wine.

Lan contemplated her coffee cup, then killed it with a last deep swallow, banging it down arse-up on the table when she was done. “Let’s go to bed, what do you say? We can have some of that angry sex we do so well and salvage something good out of this utter bastard of a day.” She got up, staggered, and dropped into her seat again with her head spinning.

He glanced at her, raising one eyebrow inquiringly.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Give me a sec. I can still storm out of here.”

He waited.

She sat.

“All right,” she said, giving in. “Take me to bed.”

Azrael crooked a finger and one of his pikemen stepped away from the wall.

Lan promptly threw a fork at him. “I said you! Not your bloody deadheads! What the hell do I want to go to bed with him for?”

“I’m not going to bed with you,” Azrael said evenly, beckoning again to the pikemen, who advanced with a distinct air of caution. “I’m angry with you, Lan.”

“Yeah, well…there’s some old saying about going to bed angry. I don’t know how it goes, but I guess it’s supposed to be good for you or something.” She gave him a punch to the arm to get his attention. It worked. She smiled at him. “Take me to bed. If you’re still angry in the morning, we can fight over breakfast.”

Azrael ignored her right up until the pikeman actually reached the dais. Then, with a low curse, he finished his drink, stood and picked her up.

“Bring the bottle,” she mumbled, wrapping her arms around him and leaning into his neck.

He did, tucking it between them before hupping her more securely into his arms to carry her.

“And another bottle. For after.”

“After you drink yourself insensible, you mean?” he muttered, but he went to the sideboard and took one.

“Stay with me,” she said as the long dining hall warped around them, swaying in rhythm with his stride. “I don’t want to be alone tonight. Stay.”

“Until you are sleeping.”

“No! All night!”

“Lan, I…” His sigh stirred her hair. “All night, then.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“See?” Lan said sleepily. “I’m a damn good negotiator.”

“You have your moments,” he agreed, carrying her away. “Truly, you do.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

She dreamed and it was funny, because while she never remembered her dreams when sober, on this night, when she was drunker than she’d ever been in her young life, she remembered it all, every detail. It began with her as a child, walking with her mother down the road to see the sheriff. This was less a dream than a memory and it was all exactly as it was—the feel of the mud sucking at her shoes, the smell of manure and peaches and smoke, the distant howling sounds of the Eaters who were always behind the walls. Her mother brought her into the building and there were Harry and Simon, the deputies, leaning up against the wall under the framed pictures of Azrael and the sour-faced old woman who used to be the Queen. Her mother gave her a pat and went on in alone to the sheriff’s inner office, and suddenly Lan was outside again, hand in hand with her mother, going to see the sheriff.

Over and over, she made that same walk, each time a little older. It was Hell, not the way the Jesus-folk said Hell was, all fire and demons jabbing at you, but Hell the way real folk said: knowing what was coming and never able to change it. She walked away miles on the same muddy stretch of road, opened the same door a hundred, hundred times, saw Simon and Harry change from beardless boys to men. She grew her breasts all over again under their knowing gaze, changed out her girly skirts for the thick denim jeans and leather boots of a working woman, felt calluses form on her farmer’s hands. Long after she’d actually stopped accompanying her mother on this monthly walk, she relived it, until suddenly, it stopped.

Now she was in a kitchen and although she had never seen it before, she knew in the way of dreams that it was Azrael’s kitchen, because it was so clean and shiny. She was making a pie. She had never in her life made a pie, so she watched with some fascination as her dream-hands did all the work with skill and speed—rolling out the dough and laying it into a glass pan on the blade of a knife, making a caramel sauce from real sugar on the stove, cutting up peaches and pouring that sauce over them, thick and red as blood, weaving the top crust and crimping down the edges. Then she picked it up and it was cooked, so she put it down because she was back in the cooking lodge at Norwood and everyone was there, waiting to be fed. They dove in at once with their forks and knives, but she guessed the pie hadn’t been baked enough because it bled when they stabbed it and she could hear screaming. She had an axe in her hands, but what could she do? It was a pie.

Back in the road, with snow blowing in her face, only it wasn’t cold. Ash then. The great, fluffy flakes that only come from a certain kind of fire. She could smell the smoke, smoke and peaches. She was walking, on her way to see the sheriff. She had five goldslip in her pocket, because her mother had died and Lan had to pay her debts. One more time, she climbed the steps to the sheriff’s building and one more time opened the door. Inside, Harry and Simon looked up from their game of cards, eternally played out beneath the disapproving faces of Azrael and the Queen. This time, for the first time, the last time, she opened the door to the sheriff’s office.

He was sitting at his desk, writing in a book, and it was all just as it had been that day when this had really happened. The window was closed, but a pane was missing, letting in that breeze that fluttered at his dingy curtain, letting in the stink of her mother’s fire. He had a lamp burning on his desk even though it was the middle of the day and plenty light out; the glass was cracked. He was drinking black tea from an old clay cup; the handle was chipped. Everything in this room was broken. He did not look up when she came in, just said, “I’ve been waiting on you.”

“I had to work,” Lan said, because she had to say it. It had already been said.

“All right then. Come on over.” He scooted his chair back and indicated the place before him on the floor, under the desk. One of his dogs was under there already. It raised its shaggy head and gave her the eye.

Lan didn’t move.

“I haven’t got all day, have I? Your mama died in debt, little Yank.”

“I brought money.”

“Fine. It’s two ‘slip a night, the same as any other foreigner pays. That’s one hundred twenty for what your mama owed last month for the two of you, plus two for the mayor’s long-residence tax, and it’ll be sixty plus one again next month and the month after that.” And he slapped at his thigh in some annoyance, making the dog under his desk get up and slouch sullenly away. “I don’t have to take it this way, girl. I’m doing you a favor. Get over here.”

And she said it again, out loud, what she had never said before this day although she’d thought it a hundred, hundred times, each time in fact that she’d had to make this walk with her mother’s hand in hers: “I could be your daughter.”

He looked at her without surprise, without disbelief. He said, “You could be the daughter of a lot of men. You’re nothing to me. You want to stay? You pay.”

Still, she didn’t move.

“If I’ve got to call them boys in to hold you down, they won’t be leaving until they’ve had a turn,” he told her with just a hint of annoyance. “Is that the way you want it?”

So Lan went to him, even as every part of her not locked into the dream screamed at her just to turn around and go. She went, every step on those splintery creaking boards taking her closer to the stink of unwashed man and unwashed dog. When she reached him, he unbuckled his belt and with both of his hands so occupied, Lan picked up his chipped clay mug and smashed it into his face. He let out a yell through streams of blood and tea, then hopped up and punched her.

In the dream, there was no pain, only a vague sensation of impact as his fist rained down. When this had all been real, there was no counting them. Within the cold clarity of the dream, she counted five blows and a kick once she fell. “Have it your own way,” he told her, his heavy boots tromping around her and away with the click-click-click of dog-paws following. “I want you out by sundown.”

He opened the door, hitting one of the pieces of his cup. It rolled across the floor, bumping up against her hand where it lay in a cooling pool of tea.

“Clean this mess up before you go,” the sheriff said, and left her.

* * *

Lan woke to the sound of a bottle rolling across the floor after being bumped by an opening door. Each component of each sound—the bump, the roll, the glass bottle, the wooden floor and the carpet that lay over it—had their own significance and their own place of honor in the wine-red throb that was Lan’s hangover.

She dragged her eyes open just wide and just long enough to identify Serafina coming toward her, then let them slam shut again. “I am not taking your shit today,” she said, oh so carefully. She wasn’t sure if it was the words, her head or the air, but something was made of glass today and it was already good and cracked. “If you say one mean thing, I swear on my mother’s boots, I’ll have you impaled.”

Serafina’s approaching footsteps halted.

Lan opened her eyes again, but her handmaiden wasn’t even looking at her. With effort, Lan pushed the blanket back and followed her apprehensive gaze.

Azrael sat before the fireplace, his hands folded over his hard stomach, staring back at Serafina. “That was a curious morning greeting,” he remarked.

Bloody hell, and now she had to think.

Lan pressed a hand to her brow to help hold her thoughts in. “That was…” she said with difficulty, “…a joke. We joke a lot, her and me. About…”

“Impalement.”

“Yeah. Look, I really need you to give me a pass on this,” Lan said, massaging her aching eyebrows. “I’m begging you. Because I am a piss-awful liar under the best of circumstances and these are not they.”

“All right. Granted. Leave that.”

Apparently, Serafina had something. She came to the bed and set it down on the edge next to Lan, then retreated. The smell of greasy sausage and strong coffee wafted up, blessed and infernal all at once.

“I can’t eat that, I’ll die,” Lan mumbled, reaching for the coffee. She sipped a little, swished it around and spit it back into the cup, then pushed the cup to the extreme corner of the tray and collapsed back onto the pillow. “Ugh. My mouth tastes like a bunch of grapes took a shit in it. What’s the score?”

“Five bottles, less perhaps three glasses, mine.”

“Not bad. Where the hell am I?” she wondered, eying the pale pink walls and smirking white angel-babies adorning the corners with a fluctuating blend of amusement and disgust that died when her gaze fell on the wardrobe. There was a gown draped over its open door. A nice gown. A dolly-dress. And not one of hers. “Whose room is this?”

“Chloe’s.”

“Who? Wait, you mean Cassius?”

“You ought not to call her that.”

“You took me to her room?” Her temper surged, carried away by the war drums in her skull. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“You insisted,” he replied calmly. “You said if you were going to be sick, you wanted to do it in her bed.”

“Oh.” She blinked a few times, processing that. It did sound rather like something she’d say. “Was I?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she muttered. “Where’s Cassius?”

“Elsewhere. Are you all right?”

“It’s all relative. I had a bad dream,” she said, for no reason. Hangovers made you say things without thinking sometimes. “Did you know?”

“I suspected.”

“Did I talk?”

“No.”

“Cry?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“What was it?” he asked. He said it like it didn’t matter, but his eyes were narrow and his hands were too tight where they locked together over his stomach.

“Norwood. It’s always Norwood, isn’t it?” She rubbed at her eyes, but of course they were dry. And sore. And much too small for the headache trying to squeeze out through the black dots in the middles. “It was my mother’s funeral and…and I made a pie. Don’t ask me any more than that.”

“All right.”

“Thank you so much. You’re a peach.”

Azrael rose and came over to the bed to help her sit up. The movement sent spears stabbing in through her eyes, but when the vertigo and internal pressure subsided, she did feel a bit clearer, enough to finally look down and notice she was entirely naked, apart from one slipper, which she was wearing on her hand. She held it up inquiringly.

“I don’t know,” he told her, dumping out her cup into the fireplace so he could fill it with coffee again. “I tried to take it from you and you cried. You said it was your only friend.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, blushing, and yanked it off. “This is why I don’t drink. I turn into a blithering git. Why did you let me drink so much?”

“You did most of it without me.”

“Why weren’t you there?”

He went still, just for a moment, only the faint flickering of his eyes showing any movement or life. Then he put cream in her coffee and placed the cup in her hands, folding her fingers around its warmth like she was the child he so often named her. “How much do you remember?”

“I wasn’t that drunk,” she said, then glanced at the slipper—her only friend, and what did that make its mate? Her blood enemy?—and amended, “Most of it, I reckon.” She reached through the red throb of her memories for proof. “I remember all the way up to you carrying me out of the room.” She looked up at him, a smile tugging at her lips. “All the way to bed? Oh, tell me we rolled around in this bed, Azrael. I want Cassius to sleep in our drippings.”

“You were drunk,” he reminded her.

“And you were noble, weren’t you?” She started to shake her head, but that was a mistake, so she drank her coffee. He hadn’t sweetened it, but the bitterness was strangely desirable this morning. “When I was sick, you probably held my hair. A prince of peaches.”

“Are you finished?”

“I haven’t even started yet. Why?” she asked after a moment.

“I want to talk to you.”

“I can’t talk. I’m barely awake.” She picked up a sausage and dropped it back onto the plate. “Or alive. What are we talking about?”

“We aren’t. I am.”

“Oh. One of those.” She tried to roll her eyes, but it hurt. She settled for rubbing them. “Okay, look. I’ll make it easy for you. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. I will never do that again. Not for a while, anyway. What else? Oh, I shouldn’t have invited myself to dinner like that. It didn’t work at all the way I wanted, so I probably won’t do that again either.”

“In that, I suppose I share blame. I’ve been avoiding you.”

“Yeah, you have. What’s up with that? I mean, okay, I know I’m not your only dolly and I understand you need some alone time with the new one to…whatever. Get to know her.” Lan drank some coffee, just to have an excuse to make a face. “I’d like to get to know her, too.”

He nodded in a distinctly unsurprised way, but didn’t answer—not to say yes, not to say no.

“Am I remembering right?” she asked. “Did you really say last night you two hadn’t come to terms yet?”

“You remember correctly.”

“What’s the hold-up? What does she want?”

“She hasn’t said, which is to say,” he went on, “she has presented me with a wild string of lies concerning her past and her great suffering and claims to seek refuge here, for which she is willing to pay all I ask.”

A cold hand reached out from Lan’s spine and gripped her right in the heart.

“She offered,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You said no?”

“No. I merely have not said yes.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

He tapped the edge of her cup and watched her choke down another bitter swallow of coffee. “Perhaps nothing.”

“Perhaps?”

“I mistrust my judgment.”

Somewhere underneath this headache, she had to have at least half a drunk still on because without any warning at all, Lan heard herself ask, “Have you slept with her?”

He took a long time in answering and his answer was, “Sleep? No. I don’t sleep with anyone. Not even you.”

“Have you—”

“I have many companions, Lan,” he interrupted. “I do not speak of you when they ask. Do not speak of them.”

She ducked her head and picked up her fork, stabbing ineffectively at her porridge. “Well, I still want to meet her.”

“Why?”

Lan reached deep, deep into her well of tact and found it hungover and empty. She said, “I want to know I’m better than she is. I want to know I’m younger or prettier or smarter or something. Anything. Because if I can’t be your only dolly, I have to be the one you want most.”

His eyes glinted. “So I will grant you the end of my Eaters.”

“Fuck the Eaters. So you’ll take me to bed.”

“Why?”

“And fuck you too, you giant asshat! Why do you think?”

Silence.

Lan wiped her stupid mouth and drank more coffee. Her head hurt.

“It was…good to see you last night,” he said at last.

“It could have been better,” she muttered.

“Yes.”

Lan pushed her breakfast around a little. “I could have been better,” she said, because she knew it was what he was waiting for.

“And?”

She sighed. “And I will be.”

He did not smile or soften in any way. “You need to mean that.”

She looked up at him, frowning because it was unfair and blushing because it wasn’t.

“I’ve been avoiding you,” he said again, “because I don’t know how to start over. But you can’t start over. You can only move on.”

Lan drew back until she bumped the headboard, a bit open-mouthed. “My mother used to say that all the time!”

“So you mentioned. You called them hopeless words, but I have been thinking on it and I’ve decided I disagree. The former denies the past and there is no future there, but the latter learns from it and so I think there must be some hope for those who choose that path. I tell you this now so you will understand when I say we are not starting over, Lan.” His eyes flickered. He rose and paced away from the bed, keeping his back to her and his face turned away. “But I am willing to move on.”

“Okay, but can we—”

“Don’t. Don’t speak. Listen.” He paced, paced, and finally swung to face her. “Lan, I have received you at your every insistence. I have granted every audience and fairly heard every argument. I have been reasoned in the face of irrationality. I have forgiven reckless defiance and willful insult. I have done all these things…” He stopped there, then growled under his breath and said, grudgingly, “…for you. But this cannot continue. If you consent to remain in Haven, you must consent to my rule.”

“Azrael—”

He silenced her with an upraised hand. “Heed me, Lan. We are negotiating the terms of your surrender.” He gave her a moment with that, then quietly said, “I allow you to go where you will, under our agreed conditions. Do you remember them?”

Lan stared at him a long time and finally leaned back against the headboard and picked up her coffee again. “Yes.”

“And I allow you to speak to me how you will. I do not demand, nor particularly desire you be entirely submissive in our conversations, provided our disagreements remain respectful. But on two points, you will be silent.” He closed the fingers of his upraised hand, all but the first, and said, “This land is mine. I choose, for now, to suffer the living in my shadow, but I will never abandon Haven. You will not speak of that again, not to me, not to anyone.”

“Oh, for crying in the piss! I was only trying—”

“Lan, heed me and be silent. I know your intention,” he said, somewhat gentler, but his eyes stayed hard and their light hardened all the rest of him. “And you have heard my answer. I have returned my engineers to their place of holding. You will not seek them out or send anyone to seek them on your behalf. If I must, I will destroy them.”

“Fine.”

His eyes flashed.

“Not, ‘Fine, destroy them,’” she said irritably. “I meant, ‘Fine, I won’t.’ Fuck. Do we have to do this right now? Do you even know what a hangover is?”

He ignored that and brought out a second finger to join the first. “I will not kill you to keep you with me. I will not accept your martyrdom in exchange for my hungering dead. You will not offer nor ever speak of that night again. I have told you this twice before. I will not tell you again. I will simply put you out. Do you hear me, Lan?”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.”

“And do you swear to abide?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you swear?” he asked sharply.

She spit on her hand without hesitation and held it out.

He looked at it. The tight set of his shoulders fell just slightly. He spit into his palm and clasped her hand in his, holding her just a little longer than the grip required to seal their agreement.

“But it’s no good, you know,” said Lan, turning her attention back to her increasingly unwelcome breakfast. As Azrael moved away to collect his mask, she lifted a heaping spoonful of porridge and watched it drop by splats back into the bowl. “We’re oil and water, me and you. You can shake us and shake us, but we’ll never mix.”

“Oil and water?” he echoed with a tired sort of humor. “No. We’re flint and steel.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes. And when we strike together, there are sparks. Fire, by its very nature, cannot help but consume and destroy, but still it can accomplish great things.” He threw her a glance and half a smile. “If properly contained and controlled.”

“And you think you can control me?”

“Ah, but you are not the fire in this metaphor, my Lan. You are the steel.”

“Not the flint?”

“I am flint.” He held up his mask, the one in faceless grey stone, before fitting it to his face. “Enduring and immoveable as only stone can be.”

“Flint breaks, you know,” she reminded him.

“So does steel, in a reckless hand.” Making a final adjustment to his mask’s strap, he came back to the bed to cup her cheek in his cool hand. “But in a master’s, it melts…” His hand moved, following the curves of her face downward, along her neck, around her shoulder. “…and is made malleable to every need…” He came teasing-close to her breast, only to slip away, the backs of his fingers brushing now at the hollow of her throat as they traveled on. “…as willing to be spoon as knife.”

“You just keep telling yourself that,” she said, amused and—might as well admit it—blushing maybe just a bit.

“I need no convincing. Any eye can see you are surely steel. Resolute as iron, with a sharp edge and the shine of silver.”

“How sad is it that that’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me?” Lan asked as his hand wandered and her breakfast got colder and greasier. “Am I going to see you tonight?”

“Yes.”

“For dinner or just bed?”

“Whatsoever you would have.”

“I’ll have it all if I get a choice.”

“Perhaps I’ll give you one.” His hand finished its chaste explorations with one final pass across her brow and over her scalp. It wasn’t easy to sit still for it. Dovey gesture and all, but her hair hurt. “Go back to sleep. Whatever the night brings, I’ll want you rested.”

“Careful what you wish for,” she warned him.

He chuckled through the mask and turned to go.

As soon as the door was shut behind him, she picked up her tray and put it on the floor so she’d have something soft to step in later, once she forgot about it. Then she lay back down and pulled Cassius’s fine blankets over her head, comfortably closing her in the throbbing dark.

Flint and steel, he said.

She smiled and slept.

* * *

Serafina woke her far and away too early and made her drink an entire pot of the nastiest tea she’d tasted since the stuff Azrael drank to get over being poisoned. Afterwards, Lan was all for crawling back under the blankets, but her handmaiden pulled her from the bed and threw her into a bath. She was scrubbed, dried, waxed, lotioned, dressed, and in every possible way made to pay the threefold curse for one night of excess and she still had lessons to get through. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t resist Serafina’s manhandling, in part because she knew it wouldn’t do any good and in larger part because she knew Master Wickham would have coffee.

At last, she was prepared to Serafina’s satisfaction and pushed out the door so her handmaiden could begin disinfecting her other mistress’s chambers of Lan’s presence. After a moment to orient herself in this largely unfamiliar part of the palace, Lan set off for the library.

She was early, or the other girl was late, because they passed in the hall and Lan was so deep in her own head that she didn’t even notice right off. Belatedly, she turned and there she was, Cassius, looking back over her own shoulder like a reflection in a fairy mirror.

She was a tall woman, almost as tall as the pikeman who had been appointed to escort her through the palace, but it wasn’t a hulking, awkward height. Her body was lean without being scrawny, all soft curves and hard edges, accented in the all the right places by the flash of a diamond necklace or the froth of a lacy sleeve. She looked hard now, here in the daylight, but Lan knew at a glance she’d soften by the candlelight in Azrael’s chamber. Her face wasn’t smudged because she forgot it was painted and rubbed at it. Her hair wasn’t disheveled because she’d scratched at the pins. She knew how to wear her gown, was as comfortable in it as in her own skin. She’d probably picked out the color herself and Serafina hadn’t even corrected her.

As for the woman inside the dress: a narrow face with narrow eyes, intelligent and bold as a raven’s. Dark hair, straight and shiny and impractically long, the sort that would fan out nicely over a pillow. Full lips, pouting even when she smiled; she would be even prettier when she was angry, petulant in pleasure. A silvery scar bisected her left eyebrow, but rather than hide it in her hair, she had accented it with gold rings. She wore another ring in the center of her lower lip, this one sturdy enough to hold an engraved pattern of crosses. And how did that feel, Lan had to wonder, slipping along the underside of Azrael’s cock?

The other woman broke the silence first: “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s you.”

“Me?”

“He won’t tell me your name. I asked, of course. He only told me—” She shrugged one round shoulder, somehow using that simple gesture to turn all the way around, sweeping her long skirts behind her so that, for a moment, she was entirely in motion, almost dancing. “—‘She’s nothing,’” she finished.

“Funny. He said the same thing about you.”

The woman acknowledged that as all women of her sort did when being insulted: with a smile. “I imagine he says that about all of us. And I imagine it’s true, for him. But whether it’s true for you, that’s the real question, isn’t it?” The woman lifted one hand to curl beneath her chin as if someone had asked her to mime ‘contemplative’. Like her shrugging twirl of a moment ago, it was a posed, unnatural gesture and it should have looked silly, but it didn’t. It was graceful and girly…and pretty. More than anything else, it was pretty. Even if the woman herself wasn’t, or at least not the same way Batuuli had been, she knew how to fake it, and worse, how to make it look like she wasn’t faking.

And that was when Lan finally realized just how bad this was, because this was a dolly. Not like Lan was or any of Azrael’s other women, or even the long-ago Lisah Tuttle, but a true dolly. She’d been born to it, had trained all her life to know her own body and to know a man’s. This was not a whore. She’d never sold herself for a bottle of water or a ferry-ride in her life. This was art, done up not in paint or stone, but flesh.

But for all that, she had a name, neither Cassius nor Chloe, but a name nonetheless. She had fingerprints and a belly button and little wispy hairs on her toe knuckles that needed waxing, same as Lan. She was not a god or a myth or a shadow, but just a woman and beneath all her pretty, graceful, girly airs, even a peach farmer from Norwood could see that woman was wary when she looked at Lan.

“You’re not what I expected,” Chloe said, now miming mild puzzlement as she looked Lan over.

“Funny,” said Lan, mentally drawing her daggers. “You’re exactly what I expected.”

Chloe smiled, but not right off. First blood to Lan.

“Is this how it’s going to be?” Chloe asked softly. “Or rather, are you certain this is how you want it to be?”

“I find it saves time.”

Chloe gave her escort a pointed look and smiled again at Lan. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Lan glanced at the pikeman, who adjusted his grip on his weapon meaningfully and shook his head. “Yeah, sure,” she said, ignoring his glare. “Come with me to the library. We can talk there.”

The pikeman thought that over, but apparently decided his job was to keep his charge from wandering and she was as secure in Wickham’s custody as in his. He gestured curtly with his chin and resumed his march. Lan followed and Chloe came after, walking beside and a little behind her with her hands folded and her neck slightly bent. She had a funny way of walking, all hip and rhythm, the way Lan imagined a snake would walk if a snake had legs. Lan couldn’t walk like that. She couldn’t even figure out how Chloe was doing it.

Master Wickham was comfortably settled in a chair by the fireplace, a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other, when Lan opened the library door. He quickly moved his cup behind the arm of the chair, then saw her and smiled. “Good gracious, you’re early,” he said, bringing his tea out of hiding. “Please, sit down.”

He saw Chloe at nearly the same moment she saw him. They both drew back slightly.

Chloe was first to recover. “Why are you drinking?” she asked, laughter threading through her words.

Master Wickham’s hand twitched, as if to hide the cup again.

“Can you give us a moment alone?” Lan asked. “I know it’s inappropriate and all, but please. Just a few minutes.”

He didn’t say yes. Frowning, he rose and set book and cup aside. “Would you like coffee?” he inquired, heading for the door and avoiding all eye contact with Lan and Chloe both. “I’ll fetch you a tray, if you like.”

“Thanks.”

“Why was he drinking?” Chloe asked again as soon as the door shut behind him. “Did you see that? Master Lareow had a—”

“Is that what you want to talk about?” Lan interrupted.

Chloe sighed and smiled. “All right. I’ll get to it, shall I? Do you know who I am?”

“I know your name isn’t Chloe.” Lan watched closely, but if the shot hit, it was a glancing blow at best, exposing no more weakness and leaving no visible scars. She tried again. “And I know you’re not from Balehurst.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No,” said Lan. “You’re not.”

Chloe shook her head, not in heated denial, but in that laughing way that silently asked if anyone else could see the stupidity she had to deal with. Speaking slowly and with a sigh, she said, “I have to prove it to you? How? What is there to say? It’s a farming town, but nothing grows well enough to make a trade by. We put out mostly flax and honey.”

“And horseshit,” said Lan. “I’ve been there, lady. I grew up not ten miles from there. I know how it sounds and it doesn’t sound like you.”

“I left when I was young,” said Chloe with a careless shrug. “But I never had another home, not really. I may have lost my accent, but I’m still from Balehurst.”

Lost her accent, she said. No one knew better than Lan, cursed with her mother’s tongue, accents were never simply ‘lost’. They had to be buried and it took a lot of shoveling. More than that, Lan couldn’t quite identify the accent Chloe had ‘found’. If it had been wholly alien to her, she might have believed it better, but it wasn’t, quite. Hiding under certain words was the faintest blush of strange—a softened R, a shortened E. The English she’d adopted was fine enough, finer than Lan’s own, but the more Lan listened, the more certain she became she was hearing a practiced lie.

“Seriously, now,” she said. “Nobody’s here but us. Where are you from?”

“Balehurst,” said Chloe, no longer smiling or sighing.

“Yeah? What color was the wall?”

“I don’t remember,” she said after a short silence. “I told you, I left when I was—”

“You remember flax and honey, but not that bright pink wall? What happened to the town that used to be where Balehurst is now?”

“I don’t know. No one ever told me.”

“An airplane fell on it. No one ever told me either, but they left the tail sticking up in front of the pub in the middle of town. Us kids used to climb on it, but you never did, because you were never there. What’s your stock, sheep or goats?”

The other woman never dropped her gaze, but her lashes fluttered. “Sheep.”

“No, it’s geese, actually, but good try, thanks for playing.” Lan got up and headed for the door.

“I’m not finished talking to you.”

“And I don’t waste my time with liars.”

An extra-loud sigh answered her, letting her know just how unreasonable and wrong she was, but when Lan’s hand touched the latch of the door, Chloe said, “I’ve never been to Balehurst.”

Lan took a moment to smother her smile before she looked back. “I’m listening.”

“I rode with a ferryman who was born there,” Chloe said in her practiced long-suffering manner. “He talked some and I took it for my own story. I didn’t know how it would go when I got here. If it went bad, I didn’t want my people to pay for my mistake.”

“And the people of Balehurst?”

“Fuck them,” said Chloe with an easy smile. “That ferryman felt me up for twenty-eight miles and charged six ‘slip for the privilege. He should have kept his hands to himself or his mouth shut. So. Is this what you do for him?” she asked with oversweet curiosity. “You’re his warmblood watchdog?”

That hit and she knew she showed it.

“I’m no one’s dog,” said Lan.

“You just sniff around his dollies for him.”

“You’re the first I’ve even met proper. If I’m sniffing, it’s only because you stink. And if I smell it, believe me, so does he.”

“Does he? Well, he’s never said so.” Chloe touched a finger to her chin and pretended to think about it. “No,” she said slowly. “No, he’s mentioned my looks a time or two, and he seems to like the sound of my singing. He likes the touch of my skin and the way I taste…”

She paused there to let that hit. Lan folded her arms and waited her out without flinching.

“…but he’s never mentioned a smell. I don’t think you know him as well as you want me to think you do.”

“I don’t give two tin shits what you think of me, dolly.”

“The feeling is mutual.” Chloe tapped her eyes at the clock over the mantel and turned a bright smile on Lan. “Much as I’d like to continue this ritual dance with you, I have music lessons, so perhaps you would be so kind as to skip the remainder of the formalities and let me come to the point.”

“What point?”

“Azrael.”

“What about him?”

“He was with you last night.”

It wasn’t a question, so Lan didn’t bother answering.

“I’m told he’s with you most nights,” Chloe was saying, coming toward her now. Her step was light, deceptively slow. Predatory, in spite of her smile and swinging hips. “And that’s fine. I don’t mind admitting I’m not eager to get under him again, but I don’t like being stood up either.”

She was still coming, trying to push Lan back ahead of her or force her to step up and square off. Lan did neither, simply folded her arms and let her come. “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

“No? I’ll make it clear for you, then. He was supposed to be with me last night.” Chloe pushed her pointed chin forward; the light glinted on the ring in her lip. “It was arranged. It took altogether too long to arrange it and I waited up all night, only to find out you had to be a jealous chavvy and keep him for yourself. Don’t do that again.”

Maybe it was her hangover. Maybe it was her less than restful night’s sleep. Or maybe it was just her nature, as in the old story about the girl and the snake. Whatever it was that made it happen, of all the ways Lan could have responded, she just had to go with, “Or you’ll what?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s not a challenge, honey.”

“It better not be.”

“All I’m saying is, let me do what I came here to do and we can be friends. Or don’t and we won’t. It makes no difference to me. I’m not making a life for myself here. As soon as I get what I want, I’ll go away, I promise. I’m no threat to you, as long as you let me have him, but if you don’t, I’ll have to try and take him. And I really think I can. No offense, but it is…” Her gaze traveled over Lan’s body, all the way down to her feet and back up again. “…rather obvious you don’t know how to dolly for a man. I do.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“I do,” Chloe said again, unoffended and with disturbing self-assurance. “And if that doesn’t scare you, it should.”

“You’re sure that’s not a challenge?”

“I’m sure you don’t want it to be. Unless you’re so confident in his faithfulness that you think you can win one. Now, me?” Chloe lowered her painted eyelids in a dolly’s stare and licked at the air, revealing a metal stud in the tip of her tongue. “I’ve never met a faithful man.”

“I don’t tell him who to fuck. And if he wants it to be me tonight, I’m not telling him no. So, this? All of this, where you don’t threaten me and we’re all friendly? This is a waste of your time and mine.”

“Yes,” said Chloe, giving Lan the sad eyes even as she continued to smile. “I was afraid it might be.” She took one more step forward, now close enough to kiss, if that were her goal. It wasn’t, but she lowered her voice to a lover’s purr, just as if it were. “They don’t breed them smart in Norwood, do they?”

Lan backed up.

“I may not know your name, but I can hear peaches and pigshit in every word that comes out of your inbred mouth.” Chloe moved forward, taking up every inch between them and smiling, smiling like a cat. “Do you honestly think you’ve seduced him with your, ha, charming country ways? Oh no. He’s just a powerful man who likes to dip it in something dirty once in a while. But believe me, the day will come when he’ll wash you off down the nearest gutter.” Her eyes cut away toward the library door as it opened on Master Wickham pushing a trolley, and she laughed like it was a joke. “Enjoy your coffee, honey.”

Lan let her get all the way to the door before giving in to the gutter in her and saying, “Hey.”

Chloe sighed prettily and looked back, one sculpted brow raised in query.

Lan said, “When you waited up last night, you forgot to mention how you did it in another room. On account of how, you know, we were fucking in your bed.”

Wickham’s eyebrows rose.

Chloe laughed, but it took a while to get started and scraped a bit on the way out. “Is that the best you can do? That’s so sad.”

“I don’t waste my best on the likes of you, dolly. I save it for him. I have to ask, though…how the hell do you sleep with all those angel-babies staring at you?”

Chloe stared at her, her smile utterly gone and lips slightly parted.

“He said it put him right off his rhythm, but he still went four times. Left me feeling about as limp as that dress you had hanging over the wardrobe door, and you shouldn’t do that, by the way. It brings them all out in creases. I’m surprised my handmaiden hasn’t told you, but then again, maybe I shouldn’t be. You’re not her mistress. I’m pretty sure she’s told you that.”

“Fuck you, you pig-ignorant twat!”

“Careful now. Your country charm is showing.”

Chloe stared at her, high spots of color bleeding through her dollypaints, then turned and swept herself away.

Master Wickham stepped aside and waited until she was gone, then shut the door and gave Lan that special look.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “She wanted to chat.”

“I see.” He wheeled the trolley over to the table where he was accustomed to hold his lessons and began to set out the coffee things, including two cups and two saucers. “Was it a useful chat?”

“Well, I think I got in a pretty decent shot there at the end, but it’s all lies, you know. I passed out drunk and he sat up and watched me, so if truth counts for any points, I reckon she won.”

“Not at all. The value of one’s experience is not dependent upon one’s success or failure, but in how one uses that experience in the future. Life is motion,” he said yet again, pouring for both of them. “And to allow oneself to think in adversarial terms is extremely limiting and ultimately self-defeating. Don’t do it, Lan. Think, not of what you win or lose, but of what you learn and what you teach, and you will always have the advantage. So. What did you learn?”

“I learned she’s a bitch.”

“I could have told you that.” He offered her the first cup and took the second for himself as he sat down. “What else?”

“I learned she’s dangerous. Or she thinks she is.”

“Ah.” He tasted his coffee, then put it at arm’s length and studied it as he asked, “And what did she learn from you?”

“I don’t know. Nothing good.” Lan scowled, but distractedly. She was far away, picking apart Cassius’s words stitch by stitch and examining each thread, coming back to the brightest again and again: “She says she’s not staying.”

“I told you that, too. But she admitted it,” he mused after a short, considering pause. “How curious. Why would she tell you such a thing and give away what would seem to me to be a most effective weapon, that of her rivalry?”

“So I’d back off and let her do what she came to do.”

“Which is what?”

“That, she didn’t say.” Lan did her coffee up with cream and sugar, watching Master Wickham inspect the contents of his cup. “Can I ask you something?”

He smiled faintly without looking up. “Why do I drink?”

“Well…yeah.”

“Have a guess,” he invited. “In fact, have three. If you get it right, you shall have a present.”

“What present?”

“I’ll take you back to Hampton Court to see the chimneys.”

Lan blinked slowly.

He smiled and nodded.

“Right,” she said. “Well. That’s…quite a hook.” She thought it over while Master Wickham stirred his coffee and occasionally sipped at it. “I guess I should start with the obvious: You like the taste.”

“That’s a very good guess.”

“I got it?”

“No,” he replied. “Although the simplest solution to any problem is most often the correct one—that’s what’s known as Occam’s Razor—in this particular case, it happens to be wrong. My sense of taste is, I imagine, somewhat diminished in death. I am quite fond of tea, for example, and given a choice, I will always choose black teas over green or red, but I confess they all taste the same to me. My preference is purely arbitrary. Try again.”

“You’re cold.”

“Another good guess. Being dead, my body is only capable of producing trace amounts of heat by way of kinetic friction and, as my work is largely sedentary, I am indeed colder to the touch than others of my kind. However,” he said, raising one warning finger against any premature celebrations, “being dead, I am not discomfited by it. One more try.”

Lan peered into his unblinking eyes, feeling out and discarding a number of equally implausible answers before settling on, “You seen us drink and were curious?”

“Saw, Lan. I saw you drink and so forth, and no. While I must confess to some curiosity when it comes to the habits of the living, as my digestive system is entirely defunct, that would be a foolish one to indulge as often as I do. But it was a good effort. It is a pity we won’t be seeing Hampton Court today, but there’s always tomorrow. However, since you’re here, shall we get started?” He set his coffee aside, virtually untouched, and opened his briefcase, angled in such a way as to block the cup from sight. “I think a quick refresher on the differences between simple past and present perfect tense—”

“You hid it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You hid your cup.”

Master Wickham looked at it, then pushed his briefcase back to open her line of sight.

“Not now,” she said. “Before.” And she laughed, shaking her head over and over as the realization grew. “Oh, you got me. You and your little guessing game, trying to get me to figure out why you drink when I was supposed to be figuring out why you hide the fact that you drink.”

He took a breath, but not to speak. He closed his briefcase, folded his hands atop it, and just waited.

“You remember drinking, don’t you?

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah, you do. You can’t taste it and you can’t feel it and you have to sick it up afterwards before it goes sour, but you still do it, because you remember doing it when you were alive.”

“No,” he said again. “As I said before, I have no true memories, only impressions. Specifically, this sound.” He picked up his cup and set it down again on its saucer, then moved both aside and made himself sigh. “I was going to let you win on your third guess, whatever it was. I knew if I didn’t, you’d keep thinking about it and eventually…” He spread his empty hands. “But when the time came, I just couldn’t.”

“You’re a teacher. It’s a lesson.”

“Precisely.” He paused, then said, “And in that same spirit, I am compelled to ask, is it your intention to…oh, how shall I put this? To do something about Cassius?”

Lan scowled. “No.”

“Oh thank heaven.” With obvious relief, he reached across the table to pat her hand. “I’m aware it won’t be easy for you, but it is the wisest course of action. The very fact that she took the time to interrogate you means she sees you as a threat. If you give her cause, she will almost certainly attempt to remove you from our lord’s favor. I personally can’t think how she’d manage it, but it doesn’t pay to provoke her, especially as the situation will resolve itself quite handily as soon as she leaves. Until then, you would be well served to do all in your power to speed her departure.”

“I don’t mean I should stay out of it because blah blah the moral high ground blah blah bollocks blah. I mean I should stay out of it because I’d only make a muck out of it. Conniving isn’t something you just have a bash at. It’s a skill like any other. You need talent or practice to be any good at it, preferably both…and I don’t have either.” Lan rediscovered her coffee and drank it off before it could get too cold, then poured herself a hot one. “Last night proves that, if I needed any more proof.”

Master Wickham settled back in his chair with one leg crossed over the other and his fingers steepled beneath his chin—his ‘listening’ pose.

“Oh, I got dollied up and tried to win him over to my new Haven idea. You should have seen me, all paints and pearls, and I impressed him so bloody much he not only said no, he told me he’d put me out if I ever asked again. When did this happen?” she demanded, thoroughly disgusted. “I always thought I was better than that, but I went and turned into a girl. Not just any girl, but Elvie bloody Peters. She could do this sort of thing in her sleep, you know.”

“I don’t know, actually. I’ve no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Elvie Peters from up the road in Norwood. Long time ago—well, not so long as all that, but longish—she heard Eithon was chatting up Tess Morgan. As if,” Lan inserted, rolling her eyes. “He’d no sooner be seen chatting her up than me. She was a pig-keeper’s girl. He was probably only there to fetch the mayor’s share of pork after slaughter, but whatever. Elvie went and told Harmon, the blacksmith’s apprentice, to ask her to the harvest ball, so he did, right out in the middle of town where everyone could see. Eithon heard about it and so he charged up all bullish and called Harmon out and you can guess how that ended.”

“I could not begin to guess. I still don’t know who any of these people are.”

“Harmon beat the hide off him, of course. Blacksmith’s apprentice against mayor’s son? No hope. And of course you know what Elvie did next.”

“I…” Wickham looked up at the glass cherubs hanging from the corners of the colored-glass windows, as if for heavenly aid. “No.”

“She went hugging on Eithon, her ‘poor, bruised lambkins,’ and let the sheriff take Harmon in for battery. He got lashed in the town square three nights running, all so Elvie could play heart-games with Eithon, and how did it end, eh? Harmon apologized to her and Eithon took her to the bloody ball! I’m not like that, damn it!”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear it.”

“Yeah, whatever, but Elvie would know six ways to get Azrael to handle stupid, sodding Cassius and do it all while flirting up some other fella. What do I know how to do?”

“I should hope you know enough to do nothing. Or do you think our lord is unaware of Cassius’s deceptions?”

“I think he’s a man,” Lan replied sourly. “And men can be stupid sometimes around a lady with a tongue-stud. Tell you what, if I ever see that pretty thing again, I’m ripping it right out.”

“Oh good gracious. Let’s call that Plan B, shall we? Not that I’m encouraging you to foment plans, but if you feel you must, they really ought to be more subtle than facial mutilation.”

“I don’t do subtle. I don’t even know how to spell it.”

“With a B.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Lan snapped. “I’m illiterate, not stupid! I know there’s no B in subtle!”

Wickham closed his eyes and murmured, “Not now. Focus. Later, but not now. Lan, when you solved The Case of the Dead Man’s Teacup, you did so by recognizing that you had asked the wrong question. I dare say you’re doing it again. Rather than focus your efforts on how to remove Cassius from our company, perhaps you ought to ask yourself why you feel the need?”

“I don’t like her, that’s why. No mystery there.”

“Ah, but isn’t there? How many of our lord’s companions do you like?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Agreed. But how is it not?”

“I don’t know. It just isn’t.”

“Tut, Lan. You disappoint me.”

That stung.

“Apply Occam’s Razor,” Wickham ordered. “The simplest answer is most often correct. What is the difference between our lord’s other companions and Cassius?”

Lan shook her head, but when that wasn’t good enough, she finally had to say it out loud: “I replaced them. And she’s replacing me.”

“Wrong, actually, and you know it. She can’t replace anyone if she’s not staying. It must be something else. What is it?”

“Just tell me, if you know!”

“I shan’t, Lan, but I will give you a hint.” He raised one finger, as if to point at the words as he said them. “She’s a goer. She’s not staying. She came here, at terrible risk, knowing she would not stay.” Smiling, he laced his hands together again. “Now. Tell me the first and most obvious conclusion you draw from that.”

“She doesn’t want to be here,” said Lan impatiently.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly what? Lots of his dollies don’t want to be…” But that wasn’t right, was it? They did want to be in Haven, every one of them. It was Azrael they didn’t want. He was a clause of the bargain they all struck to get what they wanted, whatever that might be, and even if they didn’t all stay, they had all wanted to come once upon a time. All but Cassius, hungry Cassius.

“And what does that tell you?” Wickham asked, as if he could see all these thoughts written plainly in the air above her head.

“Tells me she was pretty damned sure he’d take her in. And whether she stays or goes really doesn’t matter to me as much as the fact that she apparently has a plan and I can’t figure out what it is.”

“Our lord is well-versed in the duplicity of the living. Trust him to handle Cassius.”

“Yeah, right. Like he’s handling her now? He may not be bartering with her, but you can bet he’s fucking her.” Lan shook her head and glared into her coffee. “Men and tongue studs, Master Wickham. Men and tongue studs.”

He did not seem to know how to respond to that and after several false starts, he politely excused himself and went to his chair by the fireplace to pour out his coffee and make up some tea. He took a long time with it before he rejoined her, cup in hand and saucer capping it to prevent spillage, with a generous assortment of biscuits to weigh it down. He offered them to her and when she listlessly accepted one, he sat and assumed a lecturing rather than listening posture. “He’s fond of you, you know. Have you ever thought of simply asking him to put her out?”

“Eh, he offered, but the price was more than I wanted to pay.”

He regarded her closely over the top of his teacup. “You don’t sound very certain about that.”

“I was last night.”

“And this morning?”

“This morning, I met her.”

“Ah.” He drank and carefully matched cup to saucer. The sound was indeed distinctive. “She won’t stay, Lan.”

“You keep saying that.”

“You keep seeming to forget it. She’s not staying. She’s no threat to you. Let her be.”

He had only ever given her good advice before. Even when she didn’t like it or agree with it, she had to admit it was always good advice. This should feel the same way, if for no other reason than this precedent and her own understanding of her less than sensible nature. It should…but it didn’t.

“All right,” said Lan.

“Capital. That’s settled, then. I do enjoy our talks, even if you are early.” He had another drink of tea and set it aside. “But as you are here,” he began, opening her primer for her, “shall we begin your lessons?”

She returned his broad smile wanly. “I thought we already had.”

“You really are too clever by half, Lan.” He shook his head, tsking just under his breath as he wrote out the first lines in her book. “It is so frustrating that you persist in pretending otherwise.”

* * *

Azrael was late to dinner again that night. Worse, he’d known he was going to be late again, because he’d gone to some effort to keep her distracted in his absence. Every candle was lit and every table hung with garlands of gold ivy and white flowers. His dead court filled the lower tables with colorful clothes and chatter. His musicians played on the center stage, with masked tumblers moving around them in rhythm, dressed in little more than paint and flashy beads. Everyone was having a fine time, except Lan, because for all the light and noise and laughter, it was still an empty room.

Lan drank coffee and watched the door. Azrael’s steward made himself briefly obnoxious by blocking her view and prattling on about each and every bloody platter on the imperial table in an apparent effort to get her to eat, but Lan had been promised dinner with Azrael and until she had Azrael, she wasn’t having dinner. Eventually, the steward ran out of things to say about the duck breasts (crusted with crushed pecans and bacon and drizzled with raspberry sauce) versus the prime rib (roasted in rock salt and served with Yorkshire pudding and shallots) and retreated, leaving her to listen to her stomach growl in peace.

The dinner hour had long since given way to the after-dinner hour when Azrael finally entered, deep in talk with Deimos. His steward hurried over; Azrael sent him back with a short wave, never breaking stride. Table by table, his dead court rose to bow, their flashing jewels and rustling fabric forming the waves of a particularly gaudy ocean; he ignored them all. Lan drank off her coffee and poured herself another cup; Azrael saw her and halted mid-step, then took his captain of the Revenants back to the far end of the hall to finish their conversation. Lan waited, so patient, and did not try to guess at the dialogue that went with those sparks of eyeshine and curt hand gestures, because it couldn’t be good.

It ended with a last ominous gesture—Azrael pointing down the hall right at Lan—and then Deimos nodded and left, taking the pikemen that lined the walls with him. All of them. Lan didn’t guess at the reason for that, either. Azrael watched them all go, glanced at Lan, then heaved a visibly bracing sigh and headed for her.

“What’s up?” Lan asked when he finally reached her, not because she wanted to know, but because ignoring it would be as good as shining a light on it.

“Nothing that need concern you.”

“Sure looked like it concerned me.”

“What shall you believe, my Lan?” he countered, in what could be either the opening volley of a fresh battle or a joke. His tone suggested he was willing to go either way. “My word or your own eyes?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask what the difference was, but if she did that, the battle really would be on, so instead, she said, “Appearances can be deceiving, I guess.”

Some of the tension left him. Not much, but some. “That, they can,” he muttered, rubbing up under his mask at his scars. His gaze came back to her, dimmed, then dropped to her empty plate. “Is the meal not to your liking?”

“I don’t come to dinner for the food.”

“So I see.” Azrael watched her load up for a long siege, but took nothing for himself. “Have you been waiting on me? Why?”

“I don’t come to dinner for the food,” she said again, although it may have been difficult to make her out with her mouth full. “Why aren’t you eating?”

His gaze dropped to an artful selection of prime rib, all bloody red and fork tender, fit to grace the table of any lord. But when he reached for it, it was to lift the entire platter and hold it out for a servant to rush over and carry away. “I’ve no appetite.”

“I guess I should feel fortunate you bothered to show up at all. You could have gone straight to some other woman’s bed and let me wait on you all night.”

He tipped his head and studied her, stone-faced beneath his stone mask. “Are you rebuking your lord, Lan?”

And there it was again, that tone that was not only an invitation to a fight, but almost a demand for one.

“You told me you weren’t my lord,” she reminded him. “You’d never been titled by Men, you said.”

“But you are rebuking me.”

“When a man’s late for dinner two nights in a row, I think that’s earned a rebuke, don’t you?”

“My sincerest apologies.” He waved a servant over for wine, but took the bottle from her when she brought it and dismissed her again.

“I’m teaching you bad habits,” Lan observed as he filled his own cup.

He grunted and kept pouring. “I know worse ones.”

“So what kept you this time?” she asked, doggedly attempting to keep the mood light. “Felicity want some peacocks to go with those swans?”

“I haven’t seen Felicity today, although it is ironic you should say that, even in jest. She did ask for peafowl once.”

“Of course she did.”

“She soon returned them. Peafowl may be pleasant to the eye, but are notoriously disagreeable in every other sense.”

Lan consulted her short list of exotic birds of the world and said, “Parrots, then. Do you have parrots?”

“I do, but I’ve given them to another already.”

“Penguins.”

He gave her a look that was meant to be feigned alarm, only half-feigned. “I forbid you ever to speak to Felicity.”

“I make no promises. However,” Lan announced, “you’ll be happy to hear I met Cassius.”

“Why would that make me happy?”

“Because you arranged it.”

“Did I,” said Azrael, which was not a confession.

“Serafina is too good at her job to take me to lessons that early and I sure as hell didn’t want to go. You wanted us to bump in the halls.”

“Sound reasoning.” He watched her cut into a dumpling, shaking his head when she offered half. “And your thoughts?”

“Shockingly, I don’t like her.”

“Why not?”

Lan shrugged and reached for another dumpling.

Azrael caught her wrist and pushed her hand flat to the table with a smacking sound. “What did she say to you?” he asked quietly. “Tell me all she said.”

Out on the floor, his musicians played and tumblers tumbled. His court faked admiration or boredom as appropriate. His servants filled cups and carried away empty platters. The noise helped, filling the distance between them as it grew invisibly wider.

“She called me your dog,” said Lan. “She said you kept me to sniff out your dollies for you.”

After a moment, he released his grip on her wrist and leaned back into his throne. He picked up his cup, his eyes fixed on his flute player. The tendons in his neck creaked as they tightened. He did not speak.

Lan waited and finally said, “Was she right?”

He shrugged, his stare never wavering from the musician’s stage. “I will not deny I have doubts where Chloe’s motives are concerned. Neither will I deny I sought an unbiased opinion of her.”

Lan snorted. “If that means what I think it means, I don’t think it applies to me.”

“Perhaps not, but your particular bias is not founded in whether or not your answer is apt to please me.” He paused, then took a drink, muttering, “Indeed, I would be surprised if that was ever a consideration,” when he thought the wine would muffle it. “Did she tell you why she came to Haven? Or what she wants of me?”

“No.”

“Hm.” His thumb tapped twice on the side of the cup. He did not look at her. “Would you tell me if she did?”

“Hell, if I knew what she wanted, I’d ask you to give it to her myself. Anything to get her out the door sooner. And if it’s Cassius you want to talk about,” she inserted irritably, “maybe you should have invited her to dinner.”

“Forgive me. We’ll speak no more of her. So.” Azrael set his cup down with an air of finality and turned to her. “Apart from your morning interview and this hour’s unconscionable neglect, how passed your day?”

‘Like a kidney stone,’ Lan thought, but she’d taken enough etiquette lessons to know better than to say it. She turned her attention back to her dinner, shrugging off Cassius, her chat, and her sly, winking tongue stud. “Fine.”

“Tell me all.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“I find that difficult to believe. With fair weather and the whole of my city before you, you went nowhere? Saw nothing?”

“A long walk in the bright sunlight?” She laughed around a mouthful of pie. “You really don’t know what a hangover is, do you?”

He conceded that with a grunt and looked away, pretending to watch his musicians, but the flickering of his eyes betrayed his continued distraction.

“What about you?” Lan asked dutifully. “How did your day pass?”

“It’s not yet ended.” He glanced at her, drank some wine, and suddenly said, “Do you truly enjoy architecture or is your apparent enthusiasm merely a ruse to avoid your other studies?”

Lan held up a flat hand and wobbled it to indicate a middling pull between those options. “Why?”

“I’m told there are repairs needed at several estates in north Haven. I confess my own enthusiasm for such projects has diminished greatly in recent years, so if it at all appeals to you, I might send you in my stead to oversee their restoration.”

“Eh. I’d rather not be in charge of anything where a cock-up on my end brings some crusty old building down on someone’s head, even if they are dead to begin with. And there’s going to be a coop-full of cock-ups,” she declared, “because I don’t half-listen at lessons and I’m not about to start. You should ask Master Wickham, though. He’d be all over a job like that.”

“And you would go with him?”

“Of course not,” she said, surprised that he should think so. “I’m your dolly, not his.”

“I trust to your fidelity,” he said with a faint smile. “And I think he would be glad of your company, particularly as you share so many interests. Apart from which, the very act of restoration can be devastating to the grounds. Wickham, for all his architectural passion, has no eye for gardens.”

Startled into a laugh, she said, “And I do?”

“You’ve more experience with growing things, certainly.”

“Only peaches.” Lan pushed food around her plate, frowning. “Is that what you want? Like…an orchard?”

“If you wish. I place it utterly in your hands. Do as you will. Grow fruits. Grow herbs. Grow flowers. Have you never secretly desired to see things growing for their beauty’s sake alone?”

At one time, and not too long ago at that, she’d have jumped at the chance to do something real and useful with her time, and that was back when she’d had a whole lot less of it. Now, Lan found herself strangely reluctant and she did not know why.

“Seems like a lot of work,” Lan said finally, since Azrael was waiting. “It would take a lot of time.”

“Only so much as the task required. I set no schedule before you. And you would not be so far,” he added, spreading his hands to display his full magnanimity. “I could visit nightly, if you desired so much of my company. We could yet take our evening meals together. Plainer fare, perhaps, but the taste can only be improved away from this—” He swept a dismissive stare over the lower tables of his dead court. “—stale farce.”

“I can’t help but feel you’re trying to get rid of me,” she said, trying to pretend she was joking.

“No.” His eyes flickered. “No, Lan. I’m trying to keep you.”

And with that, he picked up his wine and went back to fake-watching his musicians.

Since he obviously intended that to be his last word, it was up to Lan to say, “You said we were moving on this morning. Is this how you want to do it? By sending me away to grub in the dirt while you roll around with—”

He laughed once, loud and bitter, and drank more wine. “You would think that,” he muttered. “You alone would think that.”

“What, then?”

“Is it so impossible to imagine I may simply wish to fill your empty hours with some pleasant distraction?”

“Yeah, it kind of is!” she shot back. “Why do I need to be distracted?”

He drew back, first frowning, then scowling, and finally thoughtful.

“The city that Haven was,” he said at last, picking his words with obvious care, “was the jewel of this land. And it has become the jewel of this world. Perhaps the last jewel. Haven is a strongbox, confining what it safeguards. The dead are content to be held. I have made them so. I am content…” There must have been more to that thought, but in the end, he only shook his head and turned it back on her. “You are not. This, I accept. The living rarely thrive in captivity. But I would have you happy.”

“And this is your answer? Run me off to North Nowhere and tell me to plant a garden?” Lan rolled her eyes. “You’re just like my mom, giving me chores because she thinks I’m bored.”

He did not smile, but had a smile pulled from him, very much against his will. “Of all the comparisons you could have made…your mother?”

“I call it like I see it. But okay, fine. If you think I’ve got to do something, maybe I could help you.”

His expression, what she could see of it, never changed, but his thumbclaw scraped down the side of his cup, shaving away a soft curl of gold as proof of some kind of emotion. “You would not offer if you had the slightest notion what I do with my days.”

“You have affairs.”

He rocked back, then leaned forward and peered at her as from a great distance, saying, “I what?”

“Have affairs,” she repeated, thinking he must have misheard her.

His surprise did not diminish. If anything, it increased. “Why on Earth would you say so?”

She laughed, bewildered. “Because you told me?”

He stared at her at least a full minute before saying, “Elaborate.”

“The day after I first got here, when we were having breakfast. I asked what you did all day and you said you had affairs over all the muss and fuss of running a city, or whatever it was you said.”

He tipped his head back to search his immortal memory and finally said, with laughing comprehension, “Civil affairs. The minutiae of managing a city such as Haven. The demands upon my day…are many. It was true once,” he mused. “In the beginning, there were fortifications to make, assaults to repel, enemies to vanquish. Strategies had to be devised. Every success or failure had to be measured, dissected, and adjusted for the next conflict. And then the reconstruction, which entailed meetings with advisors, most of whom were of my own raising, each one requiring considerable research in order to imbue them with the necessary foreknowledge and expertise. For years, my every hour was occupied. Now do you know what I do?” he asked, pouring another glass of wine and smiling in a distinctly ill-humored way as the servant whose job it was to mind his cup fidgeted behind him. “Nothing. I do nothing. I have a number of rooms about the palace set aside for the purpose and most days, I merely go there and wait until it is time to come out.”

“And this makes you late for dinner? Twice?”

“No. Most days, I said, but not today. And not tomorrow,” he added with a return toward that black mood than had shadowed him on his entrance, but before it could settle, he shook it off himself. “The odd diversion does present itself upon occasion. I have some…small matters requiring my attention at the present, but not, I think, for much longer.”

“Then you go back to sitting in a dark room and doing nothing all day?” Lan shook her head, picking currants out of her pigeon pie even though she already knew she wouldn’t be eating it. “Sounds like you’re the one who needs a hobby.”

“I have one. Taming the wild women of the north.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

He sighed and held up his hand, flattened, to rock it stiffly back and forth. His unfamiliarity with the simple gesture made it into something alien, something that should be painted on walls for men to puzzle over thousands of years from now. If there were any men left in a thousand years. Seeing it didn’t exactly warm her over, but she did find herself thawing.

Picking a last currant out of her pie, Lan waved a servant over. “Send this to Cassius,” she ordered, passing her plate up.

The servant looked at Azrael, who said, “Chloe. In the south garden room. Why?” he asked Lan, sounding only mildly curious as he inspected his wine.

“I don’t like the thought of her sitting up hungry all night.”

His smile twitched a little broader, although he did not look at her. “And why would she do that?”

“Because she’s expecting you.” Lan pushed her chair back and slipped her hand forcefully into his. “And you won’t be coming. Well…not with her, at any rate.”

“This is precisely what I mean when I say you need taming,” he remarked, unmoving.

“So tame me.”

He grunted, started to drink, then cocked an eye up at her and put his cup down again. “I propose a compromise.”

Lan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m listening.”

Gently breaking her grip on his hand, Azrael picked up the bottle of wine. “For Chloe,” he said, holding it out for the servant to take. “She’ll want something to drink with her dinner…and something to break on the wall when she realizes I will not be calling on her tonight, if…?”

“If I get a bloody garden. Tell you what,” she said, rolling her eyes at herself and her pudding heart. “Any day I’m not out staring up at Master Wickham’s stupid buildings and learning the difference between soffits and eaves, I’ll plant all the stupid flowers you could ever want.”

“And on the nights that follow those days, I am yours, entirely.” His head cocked and his gaze drifted to an unfocused point over her head. “I’m not accustomed to using that as an incentive rather than a warning, but, as an expert negotiator of my acquaintance once said, ‘Whatever works.’ Now hear me, Lan, I’ll not chain you to the garden, but if you should make other arrangements for your mornings, I shall make other arrangements for my nights and I will not allow you to interfere with them.”

Lan scowled. “Fine, but I am not going to hike across the whole of bloody Haven every day. If I’ve got to do this, I’m doing it here on the palace grounds. All right?”

He thought it over, his eyelight fluxing several times before it steadied. “Agreed,” he said and smiled faintly. “Shall you have swans?”

“Hell, no. Wait, yes. Give me all the swans, as many as you can scrape up. And on an unrelated note,” she added, as Azrael finally allowed her to pull him from his throne, “where exactly is Felicity’s room?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lan had grown up in greenhouses and knew them very well. She did not know gardens, except as the narrow stripes of flowering green that the mayor’s Missus tried to scratch up around the edges of her house and even that was mostly herbs for her kitchen. But since coming to Haven, she had become fairly familiar with the flowery sort of garden, if still not comfortable with them, useless bloody things that they were. There was a garden visible through every outward window in the palace. Even the inward windows opened on a garden of sorts, although nothing grew there but pikes and those who meditated upon them.

Yet in all the time Lan had lived in the palace, she had never seen the garden Azrael gave her or even guessed at its existence. It had been well hidden, tucked away behind the greenhouses, beyond the lawn, through some trees, and a goodly walk down a path, hidden from all but a crow’s eye. It was, in fact, as far from the palace as any place could be and still be considered ‘on the grounds’, as if even the person who had designed the thing knew it was ugly and was ashamed to let it be seen.

And, oh, was it ugly.

Lan knew she didn’t have the fondest feelings for gardens, but even she knew when something was pretty and when it wasn’t. This wasn’t and what was more, it wasn’t in such a deliberate and methodical fashion that Lan walked there for some time, just to soak it all in. So much effort had gone into assuring its ugliness that it tipped over into being, if not appealing on an aesthetic level, at least worthy of admiration.

Great care had been taken to ensure no soil was visible to the wandering eye. Crushed gravel covered the ground; larger blocks of stone made a path and even steps where necessary; boulders grew like tumors from this grey flesh. If it was all rock, it might—maybe—have seemed peaceful in one of those cultured ways folk like Lan couldn’t understand, but it wasn’t. There had to have been dozens of varieties of plant here, but even in flower, they brought no life to the garden. The brightest blooms were not quite white, the darkest shadows, not quite black. Any color they did have—soft blues or pinks or lavenders—were washed out and lost by the overabundance of grey that lay over every flower, every shrub, every stand of trees. Beds of dusty miller and campion were as mildewing rags dropped over the ground. The frosty white hairs that should have invited a furtive touch on painted ferns and lamb’s ear instead seemed the carriers of some unknown contagion. The air smelled of sweet sage and eucalyptus, yet the longer she had to breathe it in while looking at this ashen landscape, the more that good smell seemed to become one of blight.

The path that Lan followed drew itself in increasingly narrower circles through silvery lilies, sprays of pale acacia, and lacy-leafed centaurea toward the sunken center of this grey garden, until it came to a flat bottom, marked by a ring of what had been seven grey-barked trees. Four of them had been carefully burnt to blackened trunks. The remaining three were willows of some sort, with drooping branches that, in this place, could only suggest despair. At the center of this ruin, like an idol around which all the rest of this horrible place slouched in worship, had been set a towering pillar of grey stone, wrapped with chains.

“What,” said Lan upon reaching this unsettling monument, “the hell is this?”

Master Wickham, to whom had fallen the task of showing her to her new acquisition and who had strolled complacently along beside her as she viewed it in all its ghastly glory, now turned away from his inspection of a clump of flannel flowers and joined her. “It’s quite common for formal gardens to be designed around a focal point.”

“Great, now it’s got to be formal,” Lan muttered, not too quietly. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“No,” she said, even more sarcastically.

“Oh.” He peered at her a moment longer, clearly puzzled, then let it go and focused on what was, for him, the point. “A more naturalistic design would be a pleasant change from the…ah, rather over-styled areas about the grounds. You might consider—”

“He said he wanted a garden. A real one.”

“All right,” he said, after a reproving glance over the tops of those spectacles he wasn’t wearing, “but you still needn’t go in too formal a direction. A traditional cottage garden can be quite charming, particularly in a setting like this one.”

Lan looked around in something like horror, trying very hard to see the charm, but failing.

“I meant the location,” said Wickham. “The trees and such, not…” He gestured mutely at their surroundings, but although his arm waved out over beds of artemesia and lavender, both their eyes were drawn to the sunken center of this crater and to the tumorous god that squatted there.

They both stared at it for some time.

“That is the first thing that’s coming out,” Lan declared at length. “In fact, if this is really up to me, it’s all coming out.”

“If, did you say?” Wickham raised one eyebrow. “I had taken to understand you knew you were to have a garden. If not this one specifically, at least one of your own.”

“I knew, all right.”

He waited, then coughed politely into his fist and said, “Forgive me an impertinent observation, but you don’t seem very happy to have it.”

“Why the hell would I be? I didn’t ask for this. This is more of Azrael’s nonsense about dollygirls doing more than dollying for him. Bettering,” she said with a scowl. “That’s what Serafina called it. ‘Bettering’ myself. Bugger that. I can already grow a damn peach tree. I can grow marrow and beans and barley besides. I grow food. I don’t see how a stupid bloody flower is supposed to be so much better than that. Can you eat a flower?”

“Several of them, certainly.”

She gave him a withering stare.

“So plant a productive garden. Fruit trees are lovely in bloom.”

“He has a hundred greenhouses,” said Lan dismissively. “He wants flowers and shit.”

“I see.” Wickham surveyed the garden with a critical eye, turning his back to the bound pillar just as if it could really be trusted not to lash out with those chains and grab him. “First things first, as they say. We might look at some books—”

Lan sighed.

“—or better yet, tour gardens elsewhere in Haven,” he continued, hearing her but choosing not to respond. “Perhaps you can find something that inspires you to better enthusiasm than ‘flora and feces’.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I don’t breathe, as a matter of common—Oh, that’s another of your apothegms,” he said, rolling his eyes. “How droll. Now, I read up on some of the basic elements of landscape design after meeting with our lord this morning, so I’m quite comfortable to advise you up to a certain point. I’ll have one of the master groundsmiths answer any further questions concerning, oh…soil suitability and shade tolerance and the like, but I’m quite keen to get started today, if you are. Where would you suggest we begin?”

“By clearing all this out, I reckon.” Lan planted her hands on her hips in unconscious imitation of her mother and kicked at the stones lining the path. “If you can’t pull it all up, set it on fire. Hell, bury it. Fill it in, pave it over, and let’s start with flat earth.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” said Master Wickham with a polite furrow of his brows. “This area could be magnificently repurposed as a pond. And the path itself is quite well-designed with an eye toward creating miniature space and movement. It would be a shame to waste it.”

“If you say so. Like it’s not wasted already, hidden all the way out here.”

“Oh no. If she hid it, it was merely to ensure that no one saw it before she was finished. She very much intended it to be seen.” Master Wickham clasped his hands behind his back and ran his gaze slowly across the garden, bed by bed. “And I’ve no doubt it had the desired effect.”

“She?” But as soon as she said it, Lan realized she knew who ‘she’ was. There was only one person in Haven who would think of making a living garden that looked so dead. Or at least, there had been only one. “Lady Tehya?”

“She used to go for walks about the grounds. I think he must have thought she enjoyed being out of doors, as opposed to just being away from him. She appears to have set him right.” Master Wickham turned away to inspect a small grove of beech trees sticking like bones out of a mound of grey grass. “She was very good at saying things without speaking, wasn’t she?”

“Well, that changes things,” said Lan, fighting the bubble of alarm now welling up through the tar of gloom that lay invisibly over the whole of this grave masquerading as a garden.

But Wickham seemed genuinely puzzled. “How so?”

“This is a test, isn’t it? Or a trap. Or…” That bubble popped, beading gloom with paranoia. “Are we sure Azrael sent us out here? Could Cassius have had something to do with it?”

“He spoke to me directly, Lan. For the first time in ages,” he added in a wistful aside. “It was nice.”

“But he surely doesn’t mean for me to…to tear it all up!”

“If that’s what you want to do with it, that is precisely what he expects you to do. Shall we begin?” Wickham waited a few seconds, then clapped his hands briskly together, apparently taking her silence for enthusiastic assent. “Capital. Clearing the site should take several days and in the meantime, we can have a look at our lord’s hothouses and nurseries to see what we have available to us. There’s a beautiful Japanese garden in Holland Park you might find interesting. The eastern aesthetic lends itself well to small spaces like this one and would allow us to repurpose some of this stone in a more pleasing manner. And we could build a tea house,” he added brightly. “I picture something after the sukiya style, with a thatched roof, subdued colors…perhaps a broader table than is strictly necessary. I should like to hold lessons there upon occasion. And take tea. What do you think?”

Lan looked back at the chain-wrapped pillar. With the shadows of the burnt trees thrown across it and the leaves of the willows fluttering in the wind, it almost seemed to be breathing. She had to suppress a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill in the air. “I think I should talk to him before I do anything.”

“Lan, he knew which garden this was when he told me you were to have it. And I’m certain he knew what you’d want to do with it as soon as you saw it.”

“He makes mistakes. You and I both know that. He may be certain today, but I don’t want him to regret it a year from now. This place—” She looked helplessly around. “—may be all he has to remember her by.”

“She would not want a memorial from him.”

“He told me something like that once. But…”

“You want to be sure.”

“I want him to be sure,” she insisted. “Because when I dig it up, that’s what he’ll remember. That I replaced the last thing he had that his daughter made with her own hands. And it’s going to look awful, you know that,” she finished desperately. “I’ll grow all the bloody flowers I can, and I’ll try to make it all look nice, but it’ll never look like I meant to do it, not like this does!”

“That may be just what he intended.” But even as he said it, Master Wickham beckoned and began to lead her back up the winding path and out of the awful garden.

“It doesn’t have to be this instant,” she protested, even as she followed him. “It’ll give us something to talk about if he comes to dinner. If he doesn’t, it’ll give me something to fume over while I wait for him.”

“Oh, how I wish I could tolerate that, Lan,” said Wickham. “But his word to me this morning was to show you the garden and make any necessary arrangements for the commencement of your project. I can’t do that until you have a project to commence. Therefore, there is nothing in the world so important in this moment as the matter of which garden you are to have.”

“Sorry.”

“You’ve no reason to apologize,” he told her. “I understand your reluctance. I’m simply incapable of sharing it. The living have the luxury of indecision. The dead do not. It’s bloody inconvenient at times.”

The walk from the palace to the awful grey garden had seemed to take forever, located as it was on the extreme edge of the grounds, but the return flew by, giving Lan no chance at all to decide just how she was going to bring up the touchy subject of Azrael’s lost Children. She had only just stepped off the gravel path of Tehya’s garden and then she was walking on rich carpet and cold marble tiles with her muddy slippers in her hand.

She expected Master Wickham to take her to the library or, failing that, to Azrael’s bedchamber to wait for him. To her surprise, he took her all the way to the front foyer, where she saw a group of perhaps a dozen Revenants standing together—more than Lan had seen in one place anywhere outside of the garrison itself. One of them raised a gloved hand, silencing his mates, and came to meet them.

Master Wickham either was oblivious to what it meant when a Revenant stepped up with a hand on his sword or pretended to be as he said, “Would you be so kind as to inform our lord that Lan would like a word with him, if at all possible?”

The Revenant looked at Lan, then at Wickham, then over his shoulder at the other silently watchful Revenants, and finally back at Lan. “Come this way, please,” he said, stone-faced, and led her up the white stairwell that climbed to the second floor.

“Until tomorrow then,” said Master Wickham and turned to go.

“You’re not coming?”

“To question our lord? Certainly not.”

“You’re in a beastly mood, aren’t you?” she asked with a sinking heart.

“Beastly! But never mind me. If nothing else, I can organize the crew with whom you’ll be working, so that you are not forced to deal with anyone determined to be too obnoxious about taking orders from the living. The interviews should take me through six o’clock and then I’ll be right as rain again. However,” he said, polite even in a temper, “I’ll send for coffee and biscuits, in the unlikely event you finish your audience before then and feel like joining me in the library.”

“I appreciate it.”

He kept walking.

“If you’re ready, miss.” The Revenant on the stair swept one hand impatiently upward and put the other on the hilt of his sword. “Come this way, please.”

“Can you get a pot of tea, too?” Lan called. “You know the kind I like.”

He stopped and looked back, perplexed. “No, I didn’t think you cared for—oh. Oh, quite. Coffee…and tea.” He frowned, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, and finally said, “It’s a pity, circumstances being what they are. I think we could have been friends, if I were alive. Or if you were dead.”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, but he meant it well, which, as unsettling as that was on its own merits, prompted her to a weak smile.

Wickham’s gaze shifted past her to the waiting Revenant and he heaved a dead man’s sigh. “Go on,” he told her. “I’ll see you shortly. We’ll chat then.”

The Revenant took her deep into the unfamiliar territory of the second floor to a relatively plain door that opened on an equally plain room. Although it was still fairly early in the day, the curtains were closed, throwing everything into premature twilight. Lan went to open them, but saw the meditation garden below her and quickly closed them again before she could look too closely at the ‘flowers’ planted there. She turned around to ask the Revenant if there was another room she could wait in, just in time to see him shut the door on her.

And lock it.

“Wait here, please,” he said through the door—was that a joke?—and retreated, his boots thumping away down the carpeted hall.

Alone, Lan had plenty of time to look around and familiarize herself with the small, empty room in which she waited.

Because it was empty, as much as any room in the palace could be. There were lamps fixed to the wall and carpets on the floor, and it was all clean and tasteful, but the only furnishings were a small writing desk set in the center of the room with a single high-backed chair behind it, facing the door. There were no books, no paintings, nothing to do or even to look at. It was just a place to wait, so Lan sat down and waited.

It was a long wait, long enough that she could have walked all the way out to the grey garden for another look at the reason why she was here and all the way back again. For a man who supposedly did nothing all day, he didn’t seem to want to be interrupted.

The dark made both the room seem smaller and the minutes longer. After a while, Lan went to one of the lamps on the wall, but couldn’t reach it. Dragging the chair over to stand on, she investigated, but although all the parts seemed to be in place, she couldn’t see how to get the light out. Just touching the bubble did nothing. With some experimentation, she discovered she could unscrew it, but there still seemed to be no way to strike the light. She put the bubble back and stood there, peering at it in mounting frustration until startled by the suddenly opening door.

She and Azrael stared at each other—he, with his head tilted in confusion behind his snarling mask, and she, with an odd sense of embarrassment, as if he’d caught her scratching her ass, but only until she got a good look at him.

He was dressed…strangely. At first, she couldn’t even quite say how. He was wearing his black, snarling-wolf mask, nicely set off by a broad gold collar set with black stones. The jeweled band he customarily wore on his left bicep was missing; in its place, razor wire wrapped three times, cutting deep but bloodless wounds in his flesh. His belt was black leather over a loinguard made of plated gold, which itself hung low over many layers of black silk, both plain and embroidered with gold thread, the longest of which nearly reached the floor. And there was a fresh wound on his breast, deep and still wet, but the edges clean; he hadn’t moved when the blade had gone in.

Moving slowly, he raised one arm, extended his index finger, and tapped a very small panel tucked away beside the door. All the lights in the room at once came on together.

“Oh,” said Lan. Damn it, she was blushing.

“It isn’t very intuitive, is it?” He closed the door and came to lift her down from her improvised step-ladder. She didn’t need the help, strictly speaking, but the long skirt did make things tricky. “You are too young to have met many people who lived full lives before my ascension, but there was an amusing time shortly after the fall of Man’s dominion when nearly everyone I saw attempted to light every room they entered by groping at the wall. And you could see it in their eyes, not merely after that futile slap, but even before, how they knew full well that age was ended. But the habits of a lifetime do not change merely because our circumstances do.”

“Is that why you don’t use electric lights in your own room?”

“Out of habit? No. Not consciously, at any rate.” He glanced at the lamp on the wall and, curiously, when that light shone directly on him at so close a distance, his own eyeshine shut itself off, just like it came with its own panel on the wall. The color beneath was briefly distinct, but still unnameable. Then he looked back at her and his eyes glowed out white again. “I just don’t like them. They seem unnatural to me, and yes, I’m aware of the irony.”

“Then why do you leave the rest of the lights on in Haven if you don’t like them?”

He looked at her, then said, “Is this what you wished to speak with me about?”

“No, I…no.” But she still didn’t know how to begin in a tactful way, so after an interminable moment trapped in his gaze, she finally just took a breath and said it: “I went out to the garden you gave me.”

He nodded with an air of impatience. “A daunting task for one pair of hands, but you will have others to manage the more taxing labor. Wickham will see to it and act as intermediary so that you will not have to interact with them personally. I acknowledge the dead can be…intolerant of the living. If you have any difficulties, suffer any slight, you are to tell him at once and, if necessary, he will tell me.”

“It’s not that.”

“Come to it, then,” he said and if it wasn’t entirely a snap, it certainly did have teeth. So did the smile he gave her afterwards, sharpening rather than softening his appearance. “Is there something else you require?”

“No—well, yes. I’m going to need some work kit. Trousers, boots, gloves, that sort of thing.”

“Are you?” He looked at her gown, on the muddy hem of it in particular, and smiled. It was not the smile of man doing his best to deal with a problem he did not find especially relevant. To the contrary, it was the smile of man who has been relieved of a problem, and a pressing one. “Of course you are. I’ll speak to your handmaiden tonight and send you off to be fitted tomorrow. In order that you should begin work on the garden as soon as possible, it would be most efficient if you were to remain on site with the tailors until you have what you need.”

As much as she wanted out of these fussy dresses and the silly things pretending to be shoes that went with them, that prospect did not in the least appeal. However, it didn’t appear to be up to her.

“I’ll send your handmaiden with you for company,” Azrael was saying. “And Wickham, if you like. And you needn’t be closed in with them every minute. You’ll have time for lessons and the odd hour’s respite. My tailors are quite skilled and, as they have no other work at the moment, you shouldn’t be away more than…” His eyes cut away from her, looking at the door and through it, thinking. Not of clothes and tailors, Lan was sure. “Three days,” he said slowly. “Ten at most. I have never known it to take longer than ten days.”

“Fine,” said Lan, although it was not fine and she had no intention of being this accommodating when tomorrow rolled around. “But that’s not really why I wanted to talk to you. It’s the garden. The garden itself.”

“It isn’t very pleasant, I know, which is why I would like you to—”

“It was Tehya’s garden.”

Azrael eyes flared and narrowed. Otherwise, he was very still.

“Who told you that?” he asked, too quietly. Then let out a harsh cut of laughter before she could even think to lie, saying, “Wickham.”

“I asked,” she said, too late.

“I’m sure. No matter.” He turned and went swiftly back across the small room, saying, “If you have so strong an aversion, I’ll not insist upon it. You’ll have a new garden tomorrow. Now, if there’s nothing more—” He opened the door and gestured to the hall. “—I have other matters to attend to.”

“Is someone waiting for you?” she asked, not accusing or arguing, but only asking.

“Yes.” His eyes flickered. “But not who you think.”

“Then can’t we talk?”

“Not now. I’ll see you at dinner.” He seemed to know just how much weight that promise carried with her after this last run of days, because he paused and adopted a more conciliatory tone, saying, “Go to my chambers. We’ll have dinner there, without my court, without servants or music. Just you and I.”

“Five minutes, Azrael. Please.”

“I value your conversation, Lan, you know I do, but this is not a good time.”

She went, not to him, but to lay her hand on the tall back of the chair. “Would it help if I sat on your lap?”

He stared at her in tense silence one long minute and part of another, then slowly shut the door. “It might.”

“Come here. Sit down. I’m not refusing,” she said again as he came toward her. “I said I’d grow your garden and I will. I just want you to be sure that’s the garden you really want to give me, that’s all.”

“Why would I not?” he asked, pulling out the chair and seating himself.

“It was Tehya’s.”

“And?”

“And I just thought…you might want to keep it.”

“As what?” He put a hand on her hip to support her as she swung a leg over to straddle him—trickier than it looked in long skirts—and to guide her in her first rolling movements. “A shrine to her affection for me?”

“She put a lot of work into it,” said Lan, because that was the best thing that could possibly be said about that awful grey garden, but as soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t, because it was true. Tehya had put a lot of work into it. She’d put her bitterness and loss in every leaf.

“She did,” Azrael agreed, working a hand up under her rumpled skirt to stroke her bare thigh. “But I cannot make sacred everything my Children have touched, no more than I can erase all evidence of their time with me. But if it is true I can never sever myself of their memory, so it is also true I need not preserve their hatred. I have kept Tehya’s garden and I suppose I would have continued to keep it indefinitely, were I not so certain…” His voice faltered as she reached for his mask’s fastens. He waited, eyes dim and troubled, until she lifted it away, before finishing, “…of you.”

“You have a lot more confidence in me than I do.” She started to put his mask on the table behind her, but she’d never liked this one—the snarling wolf—and didn’t want it looking at her. She hung it by its strap on the pointy jobbie on the back of his chair instead. A finial, that was, or would be on a building. She had no idea she’d learned that until just this moment. “You know a garden is nothing like a greenhouse. I mean, you know that, right? What do you think I’m going to do out there?”

“Only what you must to please me, I’m sure. But whatever else that comes to, that much will always be true. It will have been to please me. And so it will be a better garden than Tehya ever gave me. Don’t.”

She had bent close to kiss him. She stopped, hovering awkwardly inches away, sharing his breath as he stared past her into the corners of this empty room, then tried to kiss him anyway. He turned away, but when she caught his face between her hands, he let her turn him back.

The first kiss was cautious, just the lightest brush of her lips across his, testing his tolerance. He neither avoided nor encouraged her, which was encouragement enough. She moved her mouth to the very corner of his, teasing for entry with the tip of her tongue. He kept shut against her, but did bring both hands to rest on the small of her back, holding her closer even if he did it only grudgingly.

Lan settled in, twining her arms around his neck and resting on his shoulders as she nibbled, sucked and prodded at his lips, all the while moving gently against him. She could feel his reluctance, but she could also feel his desire, and between the two, she knew which would win out in the end.

At last, with a growling sigh, his lips parted. She immediately took the kiss deeper, feeding him little sips of her and tasting him in return, letting the slow roll of her hips gradually quicken to match the fervency of her explorations until he gave in and kissed her back. His hands, no longer silent partners in the embrace, moved roughly over her, fighting her clothing for the possession of her body, but making no effort to cut the corset loose or even to shift her skirts. This wasn’t sex. This wasn’t even about sex. It was about heat and friction and him and her, but not sex, and her frustration when she finally realized that must have been evident, because he chuckled into her mouth and bit her on the lip.

“I know you want me,” she whispered, grinding at the proof through his skirts and hers.

“Mm.”

“You don’t want to wait.”

“But I will.”

“How long?”

“Tonight, Lan. When I have time to tend to you properly. I have other obligations at the moment.”

She wanted to tell him whoever was waiting could jolly well wait, but she was being nice. Instead, she ducked her head to peep up at him through her lashes in that way Elvie Peters made look so coy and which Lan strongly suspected made her look squinty and sleepy, and said, “I bet I could change your mind.”

“I think not.”

“I’m a really—” Lan let her hand travel down, over his scarred chest and along the ruined trail that led to his belt. “—really—” She plucked once at his buckle, then let it alone and cupped the solid bulge of him through his skirts. “—really good negotiator when I want to be.”

“True.” He caught the back of her neck and forced her to bend backwards where gravity pulled, disorienting and exhilarating at the same time. He leaned over her, filling her vision with his fanged smile, his burning stare. “But I am not without my means, diplomat.”

And the door banged open, startling a shrillish cry out of her.

Azrael straightened up at once, his left arm snapping around her in a gesture of unmistakable protection as well as support, and that was nice, but it did make it impossible for Lan to look and see for herself who had barged in on them.

Like she needed to look.

“I knew it!” Cassius shouted. “You put me off and put me off, but you’re not too busy for her, are you? No, you never are!”

Azrael’s claws dug into Lan’s side, pricking at her through her clothes. “Where and how and with whom I spend my time is nothing to do with you. Remove yourself at once from this chamber or be removed.”

Her answer was a shuddering gasp, a sickening moment of silence, and a breathless, “That’s…not a mask. That’s…your face…”

Azrael did not seem to move, but Lan felt the flinch in him. Later, she would have time to wonder if that was why it all went the way it ultimately did—not because of anything Cassius said and not even because Lan was there to hear it, but because she felt him flinch.

She didn’t have time to wonder then. In the next instant, he had lifted her off him and set her roughly on her feet. In three long strides, he caught Cassius up by the arm and dragged her with him to the open door, bellowing for a guard.

“Forgive me, lord,” said the familiar voice of the grim Revenant who had escorted Lan herself here. “I told her you were not to be disturbed, but she would not be stopped and I was not certain of my authority to force the matter.”

“Be certain of it now,” snarled Azrael, flinging Cassius out and against the dead man’s chest. “This woman is trespassing in my home. Remove her at once.”

“Trespass?” Cassius sputtered, her eyes still horror-wide, but beginning to recover some of their canny shine. “How can you…? For one mistake? How many times has she—” Her trembling finger pointed at Lan, but whatever she saw in Azrael’s bared face made her think better of inviting her into this conversation. She switched tracks, but kept her momentum, saying, “I’m sorry. Please. I have no family, no money, nothing to go back to! I deserve your anger! Punish me, but do not send me away, I beg you!”

“My anger?” Azrael’s head cocked in an exaggerated show of confusion. “I’m not angry with you. I’m done with you.”

It was Lan’s turn to flinch now, but no one saw it.

“My lord!” Cassius stammered, clutching at his arm.

He brushed her off like a biting fly, shifting his gaze to the Revenant. “Put her in a car and take her back to Balehurst. If she resists, bind her.” He turned away and found himself looking right at Lan. She couldn’t imagine he saw much condemnation in her face, but Azrael’s eyes guttered and he turned back with a scowl to say, “She can…keep the gown.”

Cassius lowered her hands to her sides and raised her chin, gone in just one cold second from his penitent dolly to a stranger. “Put it on your next whore, my lord. I want nothing from you.” And to prove it, she took the pins from her hair and dropped them, snatched the jewels from her throat and broke the clasp to throw them at his feet.

He glanced at them, then folded his arms and watched, expressionless, as she broke off baubles, one by one, from her ears and her fingers and her wrists. When they were all gone, she pulled the ribbons from the neck of her gown—no corseted walking dress, this, but something filmy and barely there, just the thing to wear lying across a bed and waiting—and let it fall around her ankles like a drift of pale blue snow. She stepped out over the top of it, brazenly naked, and spat on the floor in front of him.

Azrael was no more moved than he had been throughout this performance, but that was all Lan was taking from some porcelain dolly with a tongue stud.

“Right,” she said cheerfully and started for her. “Get ready to lick that up, twinkletits.”

Cassius turned her back and walked away, a bit faster than she otherwise might have been planning to, but with her head still high.

The Revenant moved to block Lan from following, then ran an expectant eye back at Azrael, waiting for some small change to his orders.

“Balehurst,” said Azrael. And, to prove he was not entirely above pettiness, added, “Just as she is,” and shut the door.

Silence fell, heavy and hard. He continued to face the door, motionless but for the slight flexing of his claws.

“Wow,” said Lan at last. “That was awkward. I almost feel bad for all the times I’ve done it to your other dollies.”

He looked at her, then at the scattering of dolly-bits on his floor, and back at the door again.

“I know, I know. You’ve got work to do.” She hesitated, then softly asked, “Will I see you tonight? Or has this changed things?”

He bent his neck, rubbing roughly at his scarred face, but at length said, “It’s been a difficult day. I can think of nothing I desire more than to end it, save that I end it in your arms. But I…I may be late to dinner. Will you wait for me?”

“I’m always waiting for you, Azrael,” she said. It wasn’t a complaint, but a promise. She sealed it with one more kiss—he did not return it, but he didn’t push her away either—and then she left him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lan did not count the days she spent being tailored on. She didn’t see the point. As near as she could figure it, the tailors had her shirts and trousers made by the end of the second day. Every day after that was just an awkward attempt to pretend they were working while they waited for Azrael to tell them they were done and Azrael waited for them to tell him they were done. Meanwhile, there was Lan, stuck between them, getting measured and pinned and dressed each morning and apparently not supposed to notice it was the same set of clothes every time.

After her fitting, Deimos would drive her clear across Haven to the enormous house Master Wickham had arranged for her to inhabit during her exile. Not a palace, he assured her, just a house, but there was nothing ‘just’ about the place. It was perhaps paranoid to think Deimos was taking her by a different route every day solely to keep her from figuring out exactly where she was…but paranoid didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong.

The house had a big lawn with a lot of useless trees and even more useless plants around it and although Lan knew this was probably meant to inspire her, she could not help but find their unnatural precision and trimmed appearance depressing. She far preferred the view through the windows of the west end of the house, where, on a clear day, she could just glimpse rows of tiny stone houses through the trees. She spent many silly hours fantasizing how it would be to move the living into them, not just from Norwood, but all there were left in England, where they could be safe and maybe even happy after a while, kept distant from the dead but still protected by Haven’s walls.

When she asked Master Wickham if they might have a stroll out that way to look at the houses, he reluctantly informed her it wasn’t a distant village at all, but a fairly close cemetery. It did dash her daydreams, but not her desire to see it, and after some creative wheedling, he gave in and took her over. It was the best part of her exile—seeing all those grand little houses where folk used to bury the dead, back when that was good enough. Any day she could, she’d slip her tether and sneak her way back in, wandering the rows and reading all the nice things the living wrote into their markers to remember the dead by. Beloved father. Beloved wife. Beloved child. And sometimes she cried, because that world was gone forever too, the world of the beloved dead.

Master Wickham discouraged her from these forays in his passive, polite way, by doubling up on her lessons and dragging her off into Haven to look at gardens every chance he got. Sometimes, Azrael would be there already when she returned to the just-a-house, but more often, she went to sleep alone in the overlarge bed that was hers for so long as she was here and he woke her as he slipped beneath the covers and took her silently into his chill embrace.

He always tensed when she kissed him, but allowed it, even on those nights he did nothing but let it happen. He was more comfortable with sex than kisses. So was she, if the truth be known, but the kissing came naturally when she was with him. The fucking was almost an afterthought for her, the full stop at the end of a long and complicated sentence, but for him, it was everything—reward and punishment both.

As much as she looked forward to those small hours, she dreaded them too. Oh, he was good, even if he wasn’t always gentle, but he wasn’t with her in any sense but the most physical. There was a new reserve in his love-making, a distance she could not breach, and the more she tried, the more apt he was to position her where she couldn’t see him, pin her so she couldn’t touch him, and use her in that fierce masturbatory way, just like the first time.

He never said a word. Afterwards, sometimes, he’d talk a little, but only about the fluff that didn’t matter—where she went, what she saw, how she was coming along at lessons. Then, like as not, there’d be another silent grapple in the dark, two bodies locked more in battle than in passion, teeth biting and nails scratching, her hot sweat cooling on his skin and his eyeshine lighting up her world with white, each of them pretending they could bridge the growing space between them with flesh. And eventually she’d sleep, knowing she’d wake up even more alone than she’d been with him.

She could have asked him what was on his mind, but she didn’t want to hear him say he was sorry he’d thrown Cassius out. She consoled herself with the knowledge that even if he sent someone out to fetch her back, he’d never find the lying bitch in Balehurst.

So the days passed, threatening with each new unchanged day to become her new normal, until it fell to Lan herself to decide they were done.

It happened without planning for it, like all the best and worst decisions of Lan’s young life. Spooned up against his side in that stranger’s bed, with his hand stroking slowly up and down her arm, she suddenly blurted, “I want to go home.”

His hand stilled. “Norwood?” he inquired, his voice striving for calm, even underscored as it was by a thin growl.

“What? No. I meant the other home. The palace.”

“Ah.” He resumed his gentle caresses, but did not wholly relax. “All right.”

“Really? That was easy.”

“I may as well allow it. You only obey me when it pleases you anyway.” He nudged her more comfortably into the crook of his arm and tucked the other behind his head. “If you return against my will, I should be forced to punish you. Neither of us want that.”

There was no true threat in his tone, in spite of the words themselves, but the silence that followed felt heavy, as if it were only waiting.

“Do you want me to come home?” Lan asked, even if she couldn’t help but hate herself a little for it.

He looked at her until she stopped playing with the silver rings on his side—the wound they had once closed was almost entirely healed now, no more than a raised white line, but still he kept the rings—and met his eyes before he said, “Yes.”

“You’ve been strange lately,” she said, feeling like she had to justify the question.

He grunted and turned his dim stare back on the ceiling. “I’ve been strange all my life. Therein lies the root of all our present miseries.”

“You know what I mean.”

More silence.

Without warning—without a tightening of his muscles or a flexing of his claws, without even a momentary flare of his eyelight—he said, “If you could kill me, would you?”

It caught her so entirely by surprise that by the time she thought to sputter and get angry over it, it would have been silly. She shrugged instead, using the gesture to snuggle herself closer against him. “Would you want me to?”

Now his silence had a thoughtful quality.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“Then I would.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. This is your game. What’s the magic way I could kill you?”

“Say I were human.”

“If you were human, I wouldn’t do it,” she told him.

“No?”

“You’d die on your own eventually. I’d want every moment I could get.”

Silence.

“Why?” he asked.

“Hell if I know,” she answered, snorting to blow her hair out of her face. “We haven’t exactly been giving each other an easy time.”

He grunted.

They lay together after that just long enough that Lan had to start thinking about ways to remove herself from the deeply unpleasant feel of his flesh so she could get some sleep, when he said, “Is it, Lan? Is it home? Have I made you a home with me?”

She raised her head and looked at him, startled.

He did not look back at her. His body beneath hers was cold, hard. He didn’t even appear to be breathing at the moment.

Lan lay herself back down on his chest and stared into the darkness, thinking of Norwood, thinking of home, doing all she could do to hammer those words back into a single shape, but they wouldn’t join. She might someday return to the village where she was born and it might even feel familiar and comfortable to her—certainly more comfortable than Azrael’s palace, with all its shiny lights and bathwater—but someday might as well be a thousand years off and a hundred miles distant. Tonight was all that mattered, so never mind Norwood and never mind its people and its mud and its peaches.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, you did.” And, also without planning: “Damn you.”

“Then come home.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes. It is too soon,” he added with a dimming of his eyes. “But if it is your home, my Lan, I will not keep you from it.”

With that, he gently took his arm back and got up, stooping to gather his discarded clothing.

“Are we leaving tonight?” she asked, reluctantly pushing back the blankets, but making no real effort to rise.

“I am, but you needn’t join me. It’s late. Sleep.” He dressed, then came back to the bed to cover her over again and to run his rough thumb once along her frowning lips. “Sleep, I say. I will meet you at the palace steps at the very blush of dawn, if you wish, but tonight, sleep.”

And she did. Not easily, deeply or well, but she did, and in the dreams she could not remember, his touch on her lips lingered.

* * *

So she went back, if not quite at the blush of dawn, at least that next day. He met her on the steps as promised and it was good to be home, to be back in her library, her dining hall, her bed. After all those days stuck at the tailor shop, it was even good to be out in her garden.

Grey no longer, Tehya’s garden had undergone a startling transformation in her absence. The chained stone and circle of slumped trees had become the pond Master Wickham wanted, with a platform in the middle where she supposed the tea house would eventually go, made accessible by a low stone bridge. Fish swam in the water, all over spots in black and gold and red and white, finding shade beneath floating hyacinth and lotus pads or darting up to bite at bubbles on the water’s surface. Already, her crew of deadheads were planting bamboo and low shrubs designed to further enclose and divide the remaining space, with pockets of flowers hidden here and there.

Working with her hands—hell, just being in britches and boots again—was more invigorating than even she had thought. She would never be a garden person, but she honestly didn’t mind this one so much and every day that she spent working there, she felt a glow of possessive pride that she had certainly never felt in Norwood’s greenhouses. The only sour note, ha, was that she had apparently come back smack in the middle of the peacock breeding season.

They strutted around the grounds by the dozens, perching on the wall or even bold as brass there on the palace steps, fighting and flaring their buttfeathers for the hordes of disinterested hens they hoped to impress. All day and especially all night, their intermittent screeching could be heard, so much like a human cry of suffering that Lan never really got used to it. She even asked Azrael if he could please have them moved somewhere else, at least until they were done with the noisier bits of their mating dance, but he refused, saying this was when the birds were most vulnerable to predation and if he put them any further out, they might be eaten, and wouldn’t that be a shame?

When she wasn’t out digging in the dirt (or, more often, watching dead people dig in the dirt and occasionally pointing at the places they missed), Lan was back in the library. Now that Cassius was out of the way, lessons were once again the bulk of her routine and somewhere along the way, she had apparently advanced out of the kiddie pool because her days were now divided down into subjects. Just reading was no longer good enough. Now there was arithmetic, science, biology and grammar, and at the end of every day, Lan had to do something called ‘vocabulary’. This was a word that meant learning what other words meant, which had to be the most pointless word in any language, ever. Her vocabulary words were mostly derived from whatever lesson he was trying to drive into her that day, which meant she was learning the definitions of words that were only used to define other words, like ‘adjective’ and ‘conjunction,’ words no one but people teaching other people to read would ever use. However, the concept got a hook in her and even after vocabulary was done for the day and he was nattering incessantly on about plants for the tea garden again, Lan often thought about words.

Words like ‘home’ and the disturbingly ambiguous way she had come to define it. Words she had used all her life, thinking she knew what they meant, like ‘safe’ and ‘protected’. Words that hurt a little, like ‘happy’.

‘Hero’. That was another troubling word, one Lan knew mostly from big-talking ferrymen and the farmer’s sons who pretended to be like them. They were heroes who went over Norwood’s wall to hunt, whether or not they came back with ducks or a coney, because they had dared to enter the wastes and return. They were heroes who ever sat on the wall, nicking at their palms with pocketknives to bait Eaters, and never mind that bullets couldn’t kill them any more than tears, because taking a shot at them was taking a shot at Azrael. They were heroes just for talking about rebellion, even when they did it from the muck-bins behind the stockhouse.

Lan was not a hero. She wasn’t even a good farmer. But after all the stories she’d heard, she thought she knew better than the boys of Norwood just what made a real hero and it wasn’t shooting the odds and bobs off the dead or charging desperate people a suck and a fuck to drive them ten miles down the road. As a child, she’d thought her mother was a hero, because she’d survived so long against the kind of odds that only heroes face, but as she’d gotten older, even her mother’s tales tarnished. In the end, she’d saved only herself, and she’d done it by leaving countless others behind to die so she could live another day. And maybe that was just what she had to do. When it came right down to it, dying right along with them was a bullshit legacy and if her mother hadn’t been willing to sacrifice others, Lan never would have been born safe in Norwood. Maybe there were no heroes.

All the same, when Lan had set out so many months ago, with a rucksack full of peaches and the smoke of her mother’s fire still hanging in the air, she had felt that same thrill that listening to tales of her mother’s life had once sparked in her childish heart. She was on a journey. A quest. She was going to Haven, the city where the living were forbidden to go, to look Azrael himself in the face and speak for her people, for all people. She was going to save the world or die trying.

It had started out so well. Chained in his garden of undying torture, then to his bed. Offering herself to him before being locked in a tower for refusing to accept his terms. Every moment in his company had been battle; every word, a weapon. And now look at her. No, she didn’t like the gowns she wore for him, but she wore them anyway, because he liked to see her in them and she liked to hear him tell her how beautiful she was. She seldom thought twice before buttering her bread and she had come to find that one could not only favor foods but could also refuse others just because she didn’t favor them. In his bedroom, there was no pretending she merely submitted to continue their game of wills; she anticipated his embrace, matched him heat for heat, and slept in his bed afterwards when she knew there was another as soft and warm she could call hers.

She was not a hero. She was what he had called her from the start—his courtesan. Not a slave or a prisoner, not his dolly and not even his whore, but a courtesan. And worse, there were times when she wondered if she might not be becoming his lover, a word even more alien than hero…and she was no longer certain which she’d rather be.

‘Traitor’. There was another word worth exploring.

Lan idly drew a little gibbet in the margin of her primer, then scratched it out. She was not a traitor. Everything she did, she did for the sake of the world and the living who were left in it. How she felt as she went about it was nobody’s business but her own.

So accustomed was she to tuning out Master Wickham’s voice that she did not immediately notice it had fallen silent. “I’m listening,” she said mechanically, now drawing big, stupid flowers with big, stupid, smiling faces around the scrubbed-out gibbet. “Chrysanthemums and peonies. Sounds good.”

No answer. She raised her head out of her primer to discover he was absent from the chair across from her and Azrael was in his place.

She could see nothing through the mask he wore but the hard line of his mouth and the steady light of his eyes, but all the same, there was something about him that put the wind right up her, so that her first words were not a greeting, but simply, “What happened?”

He looked away at the colored glass windows, took a deep, deep breath, and looked at her again. “We need to talk.”

Outside, somewhere, not far, a peacock screamed its too-human scream.

“Is it Norwood?” she asked numbly, because she could think of nothing else that would put this hot, sick stone of fear in her belly.

“No.”

There was no sense of relief, only a greater tension. She waited, barely breathing.

His jaw clenched. “It was a place called Mallowton.”

The name was and wasn’t familiar, both at once.

He saw her uncertainty and said, “Yes, you know it. After a fashion. It was one of the settlements you bartered with me to feed each month.”

“Was? What…What happened? Is it bad? What did they do? What did you do?” The questions came spilling out, but the last one hooked and grew suddenly large. She reached across the table and caught his stony arm. “What did you do, Azrael? What did you do?”

“Some time ago, a ferryman attempted to bring a small group of youths into Haven. He claimed to be delivering them to Solveig, unaware that my son has been dead these many months.”

Lan took her hand back fast, as if her touch could somehow transmit her memories of her own entry into Haven.

“My guards ordered the ferryman and his cargo into their custody and from there, into mine. We spoke.” Azrael rose and went to the window, staring through its many colors and keeping his broad back to her. “They told me of an army amassing in Mallowton. Men, guns and war machines I had thought long-lost, drawn together from dozens of settlements, united by the righteous cause of plundering Haven to its foundations. And why? Can you guess?”

Lan’s mind whirled, her thoughts taking on less clarity but more weight. Her neck bent until all she could see was tabletop and her pencil, looking like it had been painted there. She stared at it with a growing sense of odd wonder, this artifact outside of time. No one was left in the world who made pencils. It was a marvel, in its own way, like a spoon.

“Because I fed them,” she whispered.

“Because I fed them,” he corrected. “And what reason could I possibly have to do that, save that I was now fattening what remained of mankind as cattle for my hungering dead? Next I would be penning and breeding them to feed my unholy hordes. You see the infallible logic of the living? Do you see how they had no choice but to strike back? The vast wealth of Haven waiting to be seized was, surely, of no weight to their considerations.” He turned his head just enough to show her the fiery glint of one eye. “Fearing to be left out of this grand adventure, these reckless youths slipped out ahead of them. Had they not, I would have had no warning until that army arrived at my gate in its fullness.”

“Maybe not,” Lan said weakly. “People are always talking about fighting back, but it never happens.”

“Oh, it happens, Lan. And now I know it happens whether I am their tyrannical lord or a benevolent one. So there is no hope and there will be no truce.” He turned back to face the window, muscles coiling and uncoiling as he clenched his fists. “I sent Revenants to Mallowton.”

Lan picked up the pencil and held her breath like a stupid kid who still thought that could grant a wish.

“There is no more Mallowton.”

She let her breath go and snapped the pencil in her hands, letting both halves drop and roll away.

“And I have decided…soon…there will be no more Men.”

“Don’t,” she heard herself say. “Please.”

“This much, I have hidden from you, with somewhat less ease or success than I had hoped, but there is no hiding what comes next.” He tipped his head back, studying the rather insipid face of the woman depicted in the glass before him. “I have ordered Deimos to assemble my full forces. Once they are armed, I will send them out to empty every human settlement so unwisely raised in my shadow. I am disposed, for your sake, to be merciful. So. There are towns along the eastern coastline with ships that routinely cross the Channel. We will take them first and sweep outward across the island. Every wall will be broken. Every ruin and settlement burnt. Those who do not resist will be safely transported to the continent. Those who do…will not.” His eyes flickered and burned out bright enough to flare on the glass before him. “One way or another, it ends. Now. And there will be peace.”

No such thing. There would always be dogs and deer. Hawks and doves. The living and the dead.

“Say something,” said Azrael.

Lan stared at her empty hands. Her fingers were smudged with graphite, even though the pencil itself was gone. She rubbed her fingers together, but that only made it worse. Somewhere in this room, the clock that kept track of useless time ticked away. Otherwise, silence.

Azrael left the window and yanked her to her feet. “Say something!” he hissed.

She slapped him. Her hand struck the side of his snarling wolf mask with a dull fwap. It hurt. His head turned at the impact and stayed that way. She could see tendons through the open wound at his throat flexing, but he did not move.

She slapped him again. And again. Harder and harder each time, until her palm was stinging and her shoulder ached. He did nothing, didn’t even look at her. She wasn’t hitting him anyway. All she could hurt was herself. Lan gulped in breath, raised her shaking arm and slapped him once more, then turned around and left.

She walked out into the hall, feeling oddly light-headed. She didn’t think, not the kind of thinking that came with words; she only knew she wanted to get away, so she walked, moving gradually faster until she was running blindly, not realizing she was running to Azrael’s chambers until she was nearly there. She ran again, this time to the narrow, unlit stairs that would have led her to the Red Room, had she climbed them. She had nowhere to go. All of Haven was one many-chambered cell and every door opened back on him—the man she slept with at night, the man who made her think of the word ‘love’ for the first time in her damn life, the man who could give the order to murder every living person in an entire village and then move on to all the rest of them.

There was no more Mallowton. She didn’t know Mallowton, not really, but that didn’t stop her from feeling its loss. There had been a Mallowton, now there was not. She didn’t need to know the details; she’d already heard them once. Break the walls. Shatter the greenhouses. Burn every building. The only question was whether he had also given the order to burn the dead or whether he’d let them rise up afterwards to become the Eaters who howled at the walls of the next village.

How could he do it? He had seemed to regret giving that order when it was Norwood. She could remember with clarity that was nearly pain how it had felt that night—sitting in chains at the foot of his bed with him sitting beside her, nearly touching, and how he had tried to comfort her. Had it all been her imagination?

Of course it had. He wasn’t human. He was Azrael—Angel, Devil, Death. And she was the stupid child who had forgotten that.

Lan found herself at a curtained window and realized she had been staring at it for some time as she drowned herself in these thoughts. She realized further that the window would have opened into the meditation garden and that it had been curtained now several days. She had noticed as much…oh, days ago, when she had first come home to find Azrael waiting for her on the palace steps with the sun shining and the yard full of screaming peacocks.

Moving slow, like a woman in a dream, Lan walked closer and drew the curtain aside.

The sun was nearly gone and the inner courtyard was thrown dark in shadow, but she could see them well enough, the men meditating in Azrael’s garden. One lay in the fire pit, little more than a lump at the center of a greasy funnel of smoke and red embers, providing just enough light as he burned to see the impaling poles where the others hung. Although not all of these poor souls could be dead (and perhaps none of them were), the only movement came from one of the palace guards, stirring at the pyre with his pike to expose unburnt flesh to the flames and more quickly consume the remains.

The urge came over her to go down to them. To see their faces. To talk to them. Even as the idea grew in her, she felt sickened by it. How could it be anything but an act of cruelty to walk down to a dying man and stand before him, bathed and fed with her hair up and her clean shirt tucked into the jeans no one but her had ever worn? What possible sympathy could she show him? What was she to them but Death’s dollygirl? And worse (admitting it even in her own mind made her squirm) did she want to get any closer than this? From the window, they were only shapes; in the garden, they would be people. Did she really want to be close enough to see their suffering? To smell it?

But she’d been smelling it, hadn’t she? She’d been smelling it so long, she didn’t smell it at all anymore, like the peacocks who weren’t always peacocks and the screams she could hear and forget as she went strolling down the wooded path to plant her flowers. Edelweiss and lotus and lilies, for peace.

She went down.

Two steps out past the doors, that smell—burning fat and melted hair—slid thickly down her throat and never mind how many times she smelled it, Lan’s mouth flooded with sour waters. She lurched aside, folded up like a pocketknife and out came her afternoon coffee and several slices of lemon cake. She gulped in air gone even smokier, it seemed, and puked again, just a slimy stream of lemony bile this time, and again and again, until she was empty and light-headed from the exertion.

“Are you all right?” the pikeman called. It sounded like he was trying not to laugh and she could understand why. Hell, she’d been laughed at for her squeamishness back in Norwood, when all she’d done was avoid funeral fires…even her mother’s, where she had stood crying over the writhing body with the axe loose in her hand, useless, until Sheriff Neville took it, shoved her aside and did what family ought to have done. They’d laughed at her plenty, but not even as a child had she whooped up her guts just from the smell.

She really had become a stranger.

“I’m fine,” said Lan, spitting. She braced herself, taking deep breaths until she was certain there wouldn’t be a repeat performance, then turned around.

The burning man was a head and half an arm, a few ribs connected to a pelvis, and a black stump of a leg terminating just above the knee. As she watched, he turned his head, charred sockets aimed sightlessly in her direction, and reached the blunted bones of his arm toward her.

“Do something,” Lan heard herself say sickly. “Can’t you do something?”

The pikeman shrugged and slammed the butt of his weapon down into the burned man’s skull, releasing a plume of sparks and ash. The burned man’s jaw gaped, but he had no more lungs to scream with.

Lan’s gorge rose right to the back of her throat, even if it was just an Eater. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve roughly enough to leave her lips feeling raw and, when she was sure there would be no more embarrassing behavior, she made herself look around. The guard who had been with her during her own night in this garden was still here, although his pike had been moved, presumably so all the raiders from Mallowton could hang together. Lan counted seven pikes, but four were empty now, with nothing but the black stain of their blood left on the wood to prove they had ever been there. The remaining three hung like scarecrows, their clothes flapping around their wasted bodies. She couldn’t tell for sure through the heavy smoke, but she thought they were dying, because if they were dead, they’d be moving more. Beside them, his chest cracked open and organs exposed to the irrigating spray of saline, was their ferryman. Her ferryman.

She moved stupidly toward him, forgetting the boys impaled beside him, forgetting the watching pikeman, forgetting even the Eater in the fire…until its burning hand closed around her knee and pulled.

A little earlier, this would have been the end—she would have surely fallen facedown in the pit, breathing in live embers and screaming out blood and ashes while the Eater rolled over her and ate. It still had the strength, but it no longer had the cohesion. Its fingers—long, thin sticks of charcoal with bones stuck through them—snapped off and lay twitching on the ground. Lan stepped back, but by then, the pikeman was between her and it, shoving it deeper into the hottest coals and pinning it there.

Its head was gone. Its arms, broken. Embers glowed in the cave of its ribs. It wasn’t recognizable as a person. It wasn’t even an Eater anymore, just a writhing lump of charcoal, but it had been a boy once and so she watched it burn. The smoke burned her eyes, but it wasn’t until she turned away and found herself staring again at the pikes—the ones that were empty and the ones that weren’t—that it all blurred out of focus. Lan wiped at her eyes, staring in shame at the moisture on her fingertips as the pikeman smothered another laugh.

Across the courtyard, the ferryman’s exposed lungs took in a difficult breath. His voice was a rusty whisper, a scratch across her ear, as he asked, “Are those tears for me?”

Lan’s feet moved her closer, away from the fire and the thing that burned there. “You remember me.”

“The one who paid…” Another breath. “…with peaches.”

“Did you have any?” she asked inanely.

“Sold them. Sure…they were good,” he added, as if consoling her. “But I don’t…eat.”

Lan raised her hand, but could not bring herself to touch him, even on those few places where he seemed intact. “Can I do anything? Do you want—” She groped for something, anything, she could offer. “—a drink?”

“You don’t have to feel…anything for me, Peaches. Ferrymen…die. That’s just…the way of it. We all say we’re going to stop…and we all get caught.” He dragged in another breath and let it out as a chuckle, almost indistinguishable from the sound of ashes blowing into the air behind her. “From the day…I walked away from him…I always knew…I’d end up stuck…or burnt.” He turned his head with effort toward the burning man. “Or both.” He turned back to her and studied her seriously. “You…look good.”

She smiled wanly.

“Much better…than you used to. Treating you…well?”

She nodded, dropping her eyes, ashamed.

“I worried…about you.” He twitched on his pole, trying to shrug. “Don’t…do that much, but you…were different.”

“I am?” She looked at herself and blushed. “I was?”

The ferryman frowned. “Don’t do that, Peaches. Don’t…look back. Everyone dies…every day. We raise up and…we go on and we…don’t think about who we were. The past…is dead.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re making me…feel bad, Peaches,” he said, this man with his chest open and his bowels dangling below his feet. “Did you get…what you came for?”

“Not yet. But I still have hope.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” She dropped her eyes again, more embarrassed by this confession than by honking up her teacakes.

“I don’t remember what that feels like,” he said with a wistfulness that was somehow both distant and intense.  “But I remember… it didn’t always feel good.”

“No.” Lan looked over at the boys from Mallowton. One of them was mindlessly writhing and snapping his teeth at the other two. “It doesn’t.”

“You should go,” the ferryman told her. “You can do…me…no good. If you still believe…you can do what you came to do…go there.” He exhaled his unused breath and closed his eyes, looking perfectly at peace above his flayed chest.

Lan reluctantly retreated, unwilling somehow to turn her back on him even though he could not see her, and promptly bumped into one of the Mallowton boys. Jostled, he dropped several inches further down the spike. He and Lan screamed together, but only once. Then she clapped a shaking hand over her mouth and he sagged back onto his spike, returning to whatever innerspace he’d chosen to die in. It was the other boy who pulled himself out of it and looked at her, saw her. His hands moved, straining as if against tremendous weight to grip at his belly, showing Lan the unseen progress of the pike. His mouth worked in silence. He wet his lips, fought in a breath and choked up, “Help…me.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“I…can’t…” he said back at her. His fingers scratched at the front of his stomach. “…reach…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Help…make it…stop…”

Lan stumbled away, shaking her head and babbling apologies. The pikeman had to catch her before she could back stupidly right into the low wall of the burning pit and maybe fall in. She knew she ought to thank him, but her stomach was churning and she was afraid if she unlocked her throat for any reason, she’d be sicking up again.

The pikeman stood awkwardly beside her while she took shallow breaths and tried to stop shaking. Now and then, he looked up at the boy, who was still screaming at them with his eyes while he struggled just to breathe. At last, with a sudden scowl of resolve, the pikeman handed Lan his pike, then grabbed the boy’s ankles and pulled. The boy’s gasping whisper became a glassy shriek as the pikeman’s knees hit the ground, but with a sickening crunch, that scream broke. His jaw yawned; in eerie silence, he vomited red-black blood all down his chest. The pikeman leapt nimbly aside, but Lan stood transfixed, hot blood spattering her hair and dripping down her cheeks like tears.

The boy from Mallowton did not move. His eyes were still open and still aimed at Lan, but they did not see her. His chest shimmered as firelight reflected off his blood-soaked skin, but he wasn’t moving…not yet.

The pikeman brushed his knees off and took his weapon back. He looked back and forth between Lan and the dead boy, plainly uncomfortable, and finally said, “Do you want to sit down?”

She shook her head no and said, “Yes.”

The pikeman herded her over to the foot of the burning pit, out of the smoke, and sat her down. He stood close by, shooting her troubled glances from the corner of his eye as he stirred the burning man’s ashes. Behind him, the first Eater gnawed on its own arm, chewing away every strip of flesh where blood had splashed him. The second Eater was staring at the last boy. She hadn’t even noticed when he’d come alive and now it was as if he’d always been this way.

“What am I doing here?” Lan asked.

The guard’s pike paused, then resumed stirring with even greater force.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

He inched away from her, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on his work.

Lan watched him—not the man whose crumbling body he broke down, not the dead men in their possibly eternal torment, not even the live one in the last hours of his mortality. If there were any secrets to be learned in the garden, and it seemed to Lan that there were, it was the pikeman who held the key to understanding it. He was a young man too, or had been at his death, as young as the boys from Mallowton, but much better looking. When he’d laughed at her, his boyish features had relaxed in that carefree way that could have easily charmed open the legs of any number of women, whether he paid them or not. He’d been human once. Handsome and young and human. No matter what else he’d been in life, how was it possible for someone like him to end up here, tending Azrael’s garden? She watched him, smoke burning at her eyes, thinking if she could just understand that, maybe she’d understand everything.

He knew she was staring at him and ultimately, he must have decided she wasn’t going to stop on her own because he planted his pike in the burning man’s mostly-broken midsection and turned to face her. She watched him hunt for something to say and the longer it took, the more the feeling in her grew that it was coming, whatever it was. She saw the precise moment he settled on what to tell her, saw him rehearse it once or twice to gain confidence. He raised his hand to indicate the burning pit, the impaling spikes, the dead men, the live one, the world.

He said, “Nice night for it.”

Lan looked up. There was no trace of the sun now, not even a bruisy streak over the horizon to show where it had set. Into this perfect blackness, a column of deep red sparks rose, without hardly any wind at all to disperse it. It was dry now, but the air had that clean taste of recent rain. It was cool, but not cold. It was indeed a nice night. Regardless of what was happening here or in Mallowton or anywhere at all, the Earth kept on turning and it was still a nice night.

“Here you are.”

The pikeman came to sharp attention when Azrael entered the garden, standing away from the burning pit to allow a clear view of the blackened remains. The Eaters both turned toward the sound of his voice; the first lost interest and resumed biting holes in its own arm, but the second saw Lan. Drool overflooded its hanging jaw, dislodging clots of blood. It stretched out both arms, making clumsy snatching motions from five meters away, its brow furrowing with dumb frustration each time its grab fell short. She could feel the chillflesh popping out on her arms, but she could not make herself look away from its hungering, death-dull stare until Azrael bodily came between them.

She started to stand; he reseated her with a firm shove, then looked at his hand, rubbing the mixture of blood and ash between his fingers and studying the color it made. He paced around her, paused to lift a blood-crusted hank of her hair, then paced the other way and plucked at her sleeve, where the heat from the fire had baked the fine fabric stiff. He did not speak, only made a low, judicious sound deep in his chest as he turned to survey each of the ‘flowers’ in his garden.

“What,” said Azrael, not loudly, “have you done?”

The pikeman was as still as only the dead can be.

Lan did not look at him. She said, “I killed a man.”

“So I see.” He walked away, unhurried, to the man in question, examining the ground more closely than the Eater. The blood he had sicked up at the end had collected in a roughly circular shape, not quite closed, rounded at one end and tapered at the other. It looked a little like a comma. Inanely, Lan heard the echo of Master Wickham telling her that a comma signified a pause used to modify and separate grammatical structure. That was what this felt like—a pause, a separation. When Azrael had finished his inspection, he turned all the way around, in easy reach of the Eater, who only leaned out to one side so he never lost sight of Lan. “You killed this man.”

She nodded.

“You came unbidden to the meditation garden and killed this man.” He began to walk toward her, his eyes catching every spark from the fire, glowing out more brightly than any ember. “A man who came to invade my city, to destroy all that I have built here, to kill my undying people? To kill me!”

“I—”

“Leaving aside your questionable loyalties, let us address your appalling arrogance.” Azrael caught her chin and pulled her to her feet. “What do you imagine gives you the right to belie my orders? When I set a man to suffer, I do not want that suffering curtailed.”

“I know.”

He studied her as she avoided his eyes, then looked out over the garden again, coming eventually to rest on the pikeman. His fingers, digging at her jaw, flexed. “I am reminded that once you told me you could not bear to tend your mother’s risen husk,” he said, still staring at the pikeman, “Yet you would have me believe you sped a living man’s impalement?”

What was he looking at? Lan risked a glance and saw the shadowy smudge of ash and mud on the pikeman’s knees…and two coin-sized drops of blood on his jacket. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“That takes a certain tenacity. And a not inconsiderable amount of strength. I would not have thought it of you.” He finally looked down at her again. His eyes burned cold. “Tell me the truth.”

“The truth?” She tried to shake free of his grip, but couldn’t and had to settle for a shrill, angry laugh. “The truth is, you deserve everything people say about you.”

His head rocked back even more than when she’d slapped him.

She thrust her chin forward, twisting the knife. “You deserve everything they’ve done. Maybe you weren’t born a monster, but you sure as hell became one and monsters deserve to be hated and hunted for the rest of their lives.”

The silence was absolute now. The burning man had burnt too much to move and the pikeman had stopped stirring its ashes to stare at her, open-mouthed.

At last, Azrael said, “I give you one chance to beg my forgiveness, for I know you are upset and were you in sober mind, you would not trade all you’ve done here for the sake of one man whose doom was already writ large across his brow.”

“Your forgiveness? I’m supposed to be sorry? Me?” In spite of her best efforts, her voice began to rise. “Fine. Then I’m sorry.”

“For?” he prompted ominously.

“For trespassing in your personal garden of torture. For killing someone before you had a chance to enjoy his suffering. For hitting you.” She tossed off an angry shrug. “Take your pick. I don’t mean any of it anyway.”

His hands tightened, letting her feel the prick of each claw. He said, not loudly but with great clarity, “I’m waiting, Lan.”

“It might save some time if you just told me what to say.”

Azrael yanked her onto her toes to bring her within inches of his face, but his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper as he said, “Again and again, I have shown you privilege beyond that of any who have come before you, and again and again, you repay my generosity with insults and lies. Know that I would rather see punishment fall where it is earned—” He stabbed a stare at the pikeman beyond her, then turned the terrible heat of his eyes back on her. “—but if you insist on claiming a death, I tell you now, you will own it.”

She did not have the luxury of confusion, not even for a moment. Her anger turned at once to horror and horror to ice. She didn’t bother pleading; she fought, heaving backwards until her shoulder scraped in its socket, but she could not break his hold. He merely turned around, his grip like iron, and started walking. She dug in her feet until they went out from under her and then he dragged her. She screamed, she slapped, she scratched at the ground. His step never slowed. He took her past the pikes where Eaters writhed and snatched at her to the last boy from Mallowton and there set her roughly on her feet.

Hoarse, shaking, breathless, Lan looked up, seeing Azrael first, his arms folded across his broad chest, immoveable, unblinking. Above him, towering like a pagan idol, the boy. And beyond that, silent as scarecrows, the flayed guard and the ferryman watched her. When her eyes came at last back to Azrael, he unfolded one arm, gave the boy a slap to the stomach, and folded it again, all without expression or hesitation.

The boy woke with a groggy groan, then screamed. His eyes filled and overfilled with pain, like the Eater’s mouth with drool. He screamed again…and again…and again.

“I once saw a girl impaled in Batavia,” Azrael said, maddeningly calm. “She lived eight days, a stripling no taller than my hip, while her father, called by his neighbors ‘The Ox’ for his strength and vitality, succumbed before the pike was fully fixed.” He ran a coolly pensive gaze up and down the boy’s thin frame, musing, “The human will to survive, ineffable, makes such things impossible to predict.”

“Stop it!”

“I? Oh no, Lan. I made my will plain when I had him pinned here and my will has not changed. If you want his suffering ended, end it yourself.”

Lan reached up through air that felt as thick as tar and took hold of the boy’s ankles. Again and again, she took a bracing breath and felt her muscles tighten, but she could not bring herself to pull. If only he would tell her what he wanted—whether it was to live or die. His screams held at least some shards of fear as much as pain; his eyes were not completely devoid of intelligence and reason. She could look up at him and see that he saw her and knew what it meant to feel her gripping at him. He did not beg her to do it and did not beg her to stop. He only screamed.

Her hands fell away. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” he said, adding acidly, “Have you forgotten you’ve done so once already?”

“I can’t kill him! He can’t die!” She swung on him, her hands in shaking fists. “I came here to end the Eaters! You want me to make one!”

“Spare me your sermon. With or without you, his fate will fall on him just the same. All that changes is the timeline. How much longer shall you draw out his death? Have you no mercy?”

“Don’t you talk to me about mercy! Don’t you even say the word! You don’t know the first fucking thing about mercy or Men!”

“I know I did not go to these wretches’ home to do murder! They came to mine!”

“You know shit!” she shouted, dizzy with rage and hopelessness and horror in every possible shade.

“Mind your tongue.”

“Mind your bloody tongue, you…you dripping fuckhole shit-eating titless ass-goblin! Don’t you bloody scold me for my fucking mouth after you kill an entire town full of people who never did anything to you!”

His hand lashed out, seizing her face in a cruel grip, thumb and forefinger digging into her cheeks until she feared his claws would punch right through. “That is enough,” he snarled. “You have forgotten to whom you speak! Get on your knees—Get on your liar’s knees and beg my forgiveness!”

“No!”

“Beg and I shall allow you to flee.”

“I’m not fleeing anywhere!”

“I said, beg!” he roared.

“I’m not your fucking dog!” she shouted back at him.

“And you won’t beg.”

“No!”

“No.” He kept his grip on her, but glanced up at the impaled boy, whose voice had roughened, but who kept trying to scream regardless. “He begged, of course. He begged me to spare his life when he knew that I would not. He begged me to end his suffering when it had only just begun. He would have said anything, made any promise, but you choose instead to stand armored in my affection and lecture me on mercy—”

“Ha!”

“—and never, not even once, ask me simply…to free him.”

The heat of rage drained out of her at once.

He saw it go and his cruel smile widened. “No, you never thought of that, did you? It should have been first from your lips and would have been, if you truly cared for the plight of the living in the land of the dead. You don’t. The Lan who walked alone from Norwood to Ashcroft died in my bed, riding the Devil to rapture. You may strike my face and call me all the names you please, but you will never be that mother’s child again. You are my Lan now, made in my image…and you can stand here all night and watch this youth’s life bleed out before you, secure in the knowledge that you never sold the last piece of your pride.”

“I hate you,” she whispered and had to cover her eyes before he could see the lie in them, because it wasn’t true. Even now…even with all this before her…it wasn’t true. It broke her the way nothing else in his horrible garden could and the tears that she had kept locked up all this time came puking out. The more she fought to silence them, the harder they tore free, until she was as hoarse as the screaming boy and as lost in her own hell.

Azrael’s hand opened. She could sense it there, hovering, before it slowly curled. His knuckles brushed at the cheek where she could still feel the ghost of his claws stabbing at her, and his touch was welcome. “Lan…”

She stumbled back a step, but only one. She knelt.

“Lan,” he said again, reaching for her. “No.”

She pushed his hands away and took hold of the boy’s ankles. He tried to scream again, but his voice was gone. He could manage only a scrape of sound, so she screamed for him and pulled, then screamed again because he moved so easily. Shouldn’t it be harder to kill a man than to thread meat onto a skewer? He struggled in her grip, the struggles of a poisoned rat in the hand of the child whose task it was to pick it up and knock its head against the wall to end its pain. She ignored his weak kicks and kept pulling, bringing his feet in scrapes and lurches down the length of the pole until it got stuck somewhere inside him. When she pulled now, he only coughed blood out onto her head; she felt the hot sting of each drop. His hoarse cries died away in moans. Behind them, she heard a child sobbing, babbling that she didn’t mean it, she was sorry, she took it back, but there was no taking this back.

Lan dragged in one more breath, tasting blood, and heaved with all that was left of her strength. Something crunched. His limbs jittered wildly, then only twitched, and finally stilled. The boy sagged, slipping even further down the pole, taking on the greater weight by which the body is imbued when the soul has gone.

Lan’s tears still poured out of her, but quietly now. She was scarcely aware of them except as scratchy heat on her cheeks. She waited, staring raptly up into the boy’s slack face, her knuckles white where they still gripped him. She counted her breaths at first, but kept losing her place and having to start over. In that way, she counted almost to a hundred twice, to eighty-five once and to sixty-something three times before his legs twitched in her hands.

His eyes had not fully closed. They didn’t fully open now, but he looked at her. She honestly did not know if he’d seen her in his last moments of life, but in death, he saw her very well.

He lunged. She could hear something tear inside him. He dropped several inches all at once and continued slowly to slide. The point of the pole began to protrude along his side, wedging his ribs apart and growing impossibly huge until his skin finally tore and it could erupt. He did not notice, did not understand why he could not reach the unmoving meat staring up at him. He was not even a ‘he’ anymore, but just an it. He had been alive, he’d been briefly dead, and now it was neither. It was an Eater.

It was her Eater.

Lan’s arms dropped away. She bent until her brow touched the bloody mud at the base of the impaling pole beneath the Eater’s kicking feet and wept into the uncaring earth. For him. For her. For all the stupid boys who set off playing heroes and for their mothers, who would never know how badly they’d died, but who had surely imagined so much worse. For Mallowton, whose people had all died together for the acts of a few. For burnt barns and shattered greenhouses and the black scars left behind on the soil where no one would ever build again. For the world.

But the world was still there when she raised her aching head. She had cried harder than she’d ever cried in her life…and nothing had changed.

Azrael offered her his hand. She looked at him, then braced her shaking hands on her knees and pushed herself up. The Eater before her wailed, its fingertips scratching at the air just inches from her face, but she did not back away from it. She studied it as it struggled to reach her, still seeing a boy, just a boy. It wouldn’t be long before predation and corruption made him look like the corpse he was. Until then, hunger put the lie of life in his eyes.

Azrael let her stare as long as she wanted, making no attempt to hurry her. When she finally turned toward him, he merely removed his mask and gestured toward his cheek.

Lan looked at him as the Eaters moaned and writhed in the firelight, wondering in a detached sort of way when that face had lost its power to raise horror in her. And worse, when had his actions? Because here was a monster before her, surrounded on every side by his undying victims, and she still saw just Azrael. And even knowing what he had done—what he had made her do—the only comfort she wanted right now was his arms around her. So who was the real monster?

Azrael put his mask on and stared back at her for a while. She could see the tendons of his throat shifting as he clenched his jaw, and after several false starts, he suddenly spat, “Say something.”

She looked up into the sky, watching sparks falling up and winking out. It was oddly like looking into a deep pond, seeing pebbles fall away into the dark water. Up and down, sky and water…life and death…all the same.

“It’s a nice night,” she said. Then she turned her back on him and started walking. If he wanted to keep her, he could have; he’d proven that often enough. This time, he let her go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lan took herself to Batuuli’s room, because it was a horrible place and held only horrible memories, and therefore hopefully the last place Azrael would think to look for her.

It was clear the room had not been used. The little things—vases and paintings and delicate sculptures—had been removed now that no one was here to amuse herself by destroying them. The curtains had been taken down and the furniture covered in white cloth. The flayed pikemen who had been her punishment for allowing Lan to be presented in Azrael’s dining hall were still here, stacked together in the tall wardrobe that used to hold Batuuli’s fine gowns, still bound to their crossed poles and covered over so they wouldn’t get dusty in their neglect. Lan peeked in at one. His skin had dried, shriveling on his bones and even cracking in places. When he rolled his eye to look at her, she could hear it scraping in its socket.

It took some time to pick the knot loose so she could untie him, but he was easy enough to lift down. He weighed less than a sack of grain. His skin crackled in her hands.

She left both pikemen crumpled on the bedroom floor and went into the washroom. She took several baths. There was no soap, but she got clean enough. There were no towels, but she dried just fine without them in the open air. She had to dress again in her old clothes, reeking of smoke and blood, but that was all right. That shouldn’t be so easy to wash off.

When she was done, she filled her cupped hands with water and carried it carefully into the bedroom. One of the pikemen had managed to sit up, so she put her hands to his lipless mouth. He drank, his cracked throat clicking until the moisture softened it. She went back for more, letting him drink all he wanted until it started seeping through the holes in his belly. Then she did the same for the other pikeman. Then she turned off the lights and slipped out the bedroom window, leaping blind into the dark and landing on the soft grass.

She slept that night in the seedling room of one of Azrael’s greenhouses, curled small beneath a planting table, hidden by bags of soil. The next morning, before his workers arrived, she broke off a thick bunch of grapes and a handful of nearly-there apples and snuck out again. She ate her breakfast behind the goat pen where the new kids were quick to waken and beg for treats. She left them nibbling at her apple cores and moved on, circling the palace walls until she found an open window and climbed inside.

She came in practically on top of Deimos and what looked to be a full company of Revenants, more than could be easily counted, fair filling the hall from end to end. Deimos was talking at them, making brisk gestures to illustrate this or that point, but he looked around when Lan appeared in her unexpected way behind him and whatever he was saying ended with a terse, “Never mind. Dismissed. You, come with me.”

“No,” she said and when he reached for his sword’s hilt, she added, “Skin it, I fucking dare you.”

He didn’t, but he sure looked like he thought about it. “Our lord—”

“Your lord. Not mine.”

“Lord Azrael,” said Deimos after a short pause, “commands your presence in his chambers.”

“Lord Azrael can lick me.”

The Revenant’s expression underwent several rapid changes before settling on cautious confusion. “I…don’t…doubt it, but that is not at issue. You are to come with me at once.”

Lan rolled her eyes and started walking. He caught her arm. She spun and slapped him.

They both gave that a moment’s thought.

“All right,” said Deimos. Without releasing her, he half-turned to whistle sharply at the dispersing Revenants. He brought two of them back with a curt wave, then pushed Lan into their dual grip. “Take this to the Red Room,” he ordered and thrust a pointing finger into Lan’s face as she opened her mouth. “And you have exactly one choice in the matter and that’s whether you want to walk or be carried. Choose.”

Lan glowered at him. “Carried. That’s a lot of stairs.”

Deimos nodded to his Revenants and left, moving fast and not in the direction of Azrael’s chambers.

Lan allowed herself to be taken through the palace to the tower and up the million stairs in the dark to the Red Room. It had been a long run of rainy days since the last time she’d had to sulk here and her return had not been anticipated. Lan stood in front of the window, letting the wind cool her anger, but it took a long time. That hot knot in her chest would finally start to relax and then she would catch a hint of smoke on the breeze and once more be in the meditation garden, tasting blood and ashes as the boy died and the Eater awoke.

Footsteps, climbing fast. Someone in shoes; the hard soles echoed loudly in the stairwell, making it impossible to say for sure how many there were, but she thought it was only one person and she knew damned well who. When he reached the landing, someone knocked on the door.

Lan ignored it and pretended to look at the sky, which was the same sky she’d seen all her life, just with different clouds. She waited.

Whoever it was knocked again.

“Sod off,” said Lan.

“May I come in?”

That wasn’t Deimos.

“Master Wickham?” She turned in spite of herself, although the door was as blank-faced as it ever was. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been asked to speak with you. May I come in?”

“What if I say no?”

“An intriguing hypothetical. I suppose I could leave and report you uncooperative to Captain Deimos, who is permitted to use me an intermediary to carry out our lord’s orders, but who is incapable of allowing you to defy them. I could also open the door,” he went on lightly, “seeing as the lock is on this side. Until you actually say ‘no,’ I shall do neither, although we must consider both outcomes plausible pending determination. Are you familiar with Schrodinger’s cat?”

“I swear, if you start teaching me through the bloody door, I’m throwing myself out the window.”

He was quiet for so long, she’d begun to wonder if he’d gone away, but then he said, softly, “You said once you and I were intermedi-mates. It’s not a real word…but I flattered myself to think it was an honest sentiment.”

Lan tipped her head back and sighed, then went over and opened the damned door.

He smiled at her. He had a tray in his hands—coffee and biscuits.

“I don’t want that,” she said, returning to the window.

“I know.” He set the tray down on her vanity and picked up a folded piece of paper that had been tucked beneath the saucer. “Our lord—”

“Give it here.”

He passed it over with a dubious expression that turned faintly pained when Lan flicked the paper out the window. It spun away like a maple seed and was soon lost to sight. Lan watched the clouds like they were the only ones she’d ever seen. She was not remotely curious as to what the note had said. Not even a little bit.

Wickham poured her a cup of coffee, started to offer it, then took it back and said, “You’re not going to give this a chuck, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Here, then.”

“I don’t want it.”

Undaunted, he sipped at it himself while she picked at the mortar between the stones surrounding the window. She cracked a fingernail. The mortar did not flake up.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

He neither flinched nor apologized. “You’re a clever girl. I think you can guess.”

“Then you’ve been lying to me all this time.”

“I had no choice but to obey my lord’s command. I don’t expect you to understand that, but it is true. He speaks…and his voice is the very firmament of the earth. I had no choice, but I say and I think I say honestly that I never would have chosen to lie, even at the risk of damaging our trust. I am a tidy man, as I’ve said. Lies are so untidy.” His brows knit. “Does that…Does that help?”

It did, rather.

“Will he let you tell me the truth now?”

“Yes.”

“How can I believe you?”

Wickham gazed at her placidly. “Ask him.”

Lan frowned and looked out the window. “Tell me about the army Azrael is sending to wipe out humanity. Have they left yet?”

“Our lord gave no such order. He’s merely removing them in order to discourage insurgency that might lead to further unfortunate acts.”

“Like the slaughter at Mallowton?”

“Like the decision of those at Mallowton to rebel against our lord’s rule, thus demanding an immediate and incontrovertible response. If the living choose to provoke violence,” he said with gentle rebuke, “they will have to accept the consequences. And no, they haven’t left yet.”

“What’s he waiting for?”

“We haven’t many vehicles in Haven and most of those we do have are entirely unsuitable as troop transport. Although it only takes a few Revenants to…” Wickham stopped there, thankfully, and said instead, “Suffice to say, to make the most bloodless victory possible requires a simultaneous assault upon multiple strategic targets. More vehicles must be acquired before the purge can begin.”

“The purge. You’ve got a name for it already.” Lan glared at him while he drank her coffee. “And where is he getting those vehicles?”

Master Wickham did not answer.

“So don’t tell me it’s bloodless.” The last word twisted in her mouth; she spat it out. “It was never going to be bloodless! You know, I know and Azrael knows no one is going to watch those ferries roll up and those Revenants hop out and say, ‘Give us a tick to pack and we’re off!’ So what you’re really saying is, he wants to kill everyone, all in one night. He doesn’t want it bloodless, he just wants it over!”

She thought he would ask her why she was here in the tower then, instead of talking to the one person who could actually change things, or maybe trot out a ‘Life is motion’ or ‘You have to want the time you have,’ or any other number of Wickisms she’d come to expect from him. Instead, he drank her coffee and watched the sick sky darken with her and finally said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him, her hot breath hitching in her throat.

“I am. I can do nothing to help you, but I am genuinely, deeply, profoundly sorry it has come to this and I am sorriest of all to see you so hurt by it.” He put his empty cup on its saucer and returned them both to the tray on the vanity, then moved to the door. When he had his hand on the latch, he said, “What does that tell you?” And then he left.

Lan kept her back to the door, but listened to his footsteps recede. Then she waited to hear a Revenant’s boots coming back to drag her away, but that never happened. The smell of coffee swelled and swelled until it pushed out even the stink of corpse-smoke and day-old blood, but it wasn’t until the coffee cooled and its good smell died away again that Lan gave in and poured herself a cup. She drank it bitter between bites of dry, crumbly biscuits, and then cried because she had become the sort of person who could kill a boy and still want sugar in her coffee.

The clouds thickened. Rain that had been threatening itself all afternoon finally arrived. Lan maintained her stubborn vigil for a while, but the picture she made standing alone overlooking Haven wasn’t worth getting wet for, especially since no one could see it. She went over to the bed and sat, listening to the rain and thinking of the ferryman in Azrael’s garden, getting water in his open chest. Did it hurt? She couldn’t imagine it not hurting, but maybe it wasn’t so bad, comparatively. She wondered if someone would stop her if she just took a blanket down and covered him up against the weather. Except there was that other guard there, so she’d have to bring two blankets. As for the Eaters, they could get wet.

Lan did not gather the blankets off her bed. She lay down on it instead, folding her hands over her stomach and staring at the ceiling. She thought about her ferryman, but not the way she thought she would, not flayed open and impaled, but just driving…the music he’d let her play…how he’d bought her dinner at the waystation…even that little time in the back of his ferry and the feel of his hands on her. She wondered if he remembered sex or if it was like hope, that he could not remember except as something he used to know.

The day died. The light faded. There was a lamp on the vanity and a box of matches to light it, since there were no electrics in the tower, but Lan didn’t get up. She watched it get darker and when she could no longer see the spaces between the tiles to count them, she rolled over and faced the wall. Her stomach growled, reminding her she’d missed two meals already and how many more was she going to miss before she quit pouting? Because that was all this was and she knew it. If this were Norwood and if her mother were still alive, she would have had Lan out of this room and on about her chores and never mind Mallowton or the garden or killing a kid. There were no excuses good enough to mope the day away. ‘If you can do something, do something,’ she used to say. ‘If you can’t, do something else, but quit sulking or I’ll give you something to sulk about.’

Who would have ever thought she’d miss hearing that? Or miss seeing that face, her head perpetually cocked because her left eye was nothing but a socket full of scars? She missed her mother’s hands—rough and chapped, with a knuckle bitten off on one and two fingers that wouldn’t bend on the other, so she was constantly flicking people the Vs if she didn’t consciously fold them down when she made a fist. She missed the heat of her mother’s body close to hers on the camp bed they shared in the women’s lodge and how she’d wake at the slightest cough or rustle in the dark and sit up, knife in hand, to listen…then lean over and touch Lan’s face, so lightly, never knowing Lan was awake to feel it or to hear her mother’s whisper, “She’s okay. She’s just fine,” as she tried to talk herself into going back to sleep.

She’d never told Lan she loved her. Lan never told her either. She’d missed…so much.

Heavy footsteps on the stairs. The guards, coming to fetch her down for dinner. Lan brushed at her eyes, which were dry but smarting, and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders. Light splashed across the wall when the door opened, but Lan did not move. “Sod off,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“No one in the dining hall is hungry,” Azrael’s voice replied. “But they attend when summoned and so will you.”

Lan stared at the wall as he entered and crossed the very limited space between them to set his lamp down next to her unlit one on the vanity.

“Does it really help so much to do your suffering in the dark?” he asked, lighting it.

She did not answer.

“It makes a far more impressive picture if one were to see your silhouette at the window throughout the night and know you neither slept nor ate for grief’s sake.” He picked up the coffee pot and shook it so she could hear how empty it was.

She stayed silent.

“If you meant to convince me you were sleeping, you shouldn’t have spoken. I don’t know how you could sleep in here in any event,” he added in a more thoughtful tone. “It’s so…red.”

“It’s the Red Room. And you put me here.”

“I did. If your argument follows that my will is absolute, please recall I put you in my bedchamber also.”

“I don’t want to see you.”

A beat of silence, followed by his impassive, “Then you will pass an unhappy night, but you are coming to dinner even if you must come in chains.”

“Go get them.”

He was silent. So was she. Outside, it rained harder. Memory: her own voice like a third person in this room, saying, ‘It should rain on bad days.’

“I waited for you all night,” he said.

Lan frowned and curled up smaller.

“In your absence, I relived every regrettable word that passed between us. They cannot be unmade, but even so, I think you should know that if you had begged me for their lives, or even for their deaths, I would not have granted it. I said it…because I knew nothing would hurt you more.”

“Yeah, well…I’m sorry I called you titless. I know I said more than that, but that’s all I remember for sure.” Lan sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, facing him. “Take your mask off.”

He raised his chin. “You wish to strike me?”

“No, I’m just not going to talk at your fake face. Take it off.”

After a moment, he did, setting it aside on the vanity between the two lamps. Despite their light, against the white canvas, the gold mask had no luster. Everything in this room looked like it had been abandoned for years, she realized. Including him. Including her.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, staring into the eyes of his mask. “And I think I know when they got here, those boys.”

“Do you?”

“It was the night I invited myself to dinner, wasn’t it? The night I got drunk because you were so late?”

No answer. No sound.

“You brought those boys in. You put them in your dungeon. I don’t think you interrogated them that night, you would have wanted them to get a little hungrier first, but you started sharpening the poles that would be their pikes…and then you came to dinner with me.”

“I didn’t know you’d be there.”

“But the rest is right.”

“More or less.”

“And the next day,” Lan mused. “And the next and the next…and every day until you planted them in your garden…you starved them and tortured them how many hours? Before you met me for dinner. And took me to bed.”

He did not reply.

“You put your hands on me when you knew they were bloody.”

“Ah. Is that the act that bloodied them? I had no idea I had retained so much of my innocence.”

“You sell it in pieces,” she reminded him. “And you sold mine too, you son of a bitch.”

Azrael went to the window and stared out over his city. His hands were clasped, relaxed, behind his back. He could have been painted just this way and hung in the gallery downstairs, and apart from the exposed knobs of his vertebrae, grey skin and unconventional attire, he would have fit right in. “Nearly ten thousand people reside in Haven,” he said at last, sweeping his gaze across its walls. “Perhaps I cannot claim they live here…but they do reside. It is their home. I do what I must to defend it.”

“Don’t. Don’t even try. They were kids. And what did they have, guns?! What possible harm could they have done? Maybe they could have put a few holes in some of your beautiful people, but so what? You could have just thrown them out.”

He rubbed at his face.

“Well, you could have! Instead, you butchered everyone they knew and then pinned them out in the garden to die! All they wanted to do was eat!”

His fist struck the window’s frame with a flat, undramatic sound that nevertheless made her jump. “No,” he said after a long pause. He did not raise his voice. His hand on the windowsill was still clenched tight, but that was the only sign of his continued anger he allowed to show. “Say what you will of the quality of life outside these walls, but you and I both know they were fed, and that damned recently, so that is not all they wanted. That is not even part of what they wanted. Their wants began and ended with violence.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They admitted as much.”

“Before or after you impaled them?” The word alone brought it all back. She fought not to remember, but it wormed in—the ease of it, the sounds he made, the taste of blood in her mouth. Her stomach rolled. She pressed the back of her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, concentrating on taking deep breaths so she wouldn’t be sick. “They would have said anything,” she said, once she was more or less sure the danger was past. “They were boys.”

He took a few deep breaths, motionless but for the minute flexing of his muscles, and said, “They fancied themselves men enough to do murder in Haven. They were men enough to die here.”

“Sure, go ahead. Tell me how they deserved it. Tell me—Tell me about that little girl,” she said suddenly. “The one that lived eight days. Hip-high, you said. What made her grown up enough that you had to defend yourself by impaling a little girl?”

“She wasn’t mine.” He spoke no louder—if anything, he spoke more quietly—but every word struck with its own weight. “She was caught up in some forgettable squabble between opposing landowners. She and her entire family, executed the same as witches and poisoners for the unpardonable crime of being in the way of another lord’s encroachment. Those were human hands that set that pike, human hands that set her on it.”

“So you, what? Just watched? You saw a little girl impaled, a girl you knew did nothing wrong, and all you did was count the days? What the hell is wrong with you? Get out of my room!”

“What should I have done, hanging there beside her?” His voice roughened, but only a little. He remained at the window, very still, by all appearances, calm. “I could not spare myself that fate. How should I spare her?”

Lan’s stomach rolled again. “You…?”

“I had been caught in a trap set for wolves and by the time I was found, I was too weak from cold and hunger to resist the men who thought me a demon. They dragged me by my bloodied leg to the carrion fields, and there six men held me—among them, the girl’s father, the Ox—while a seventh set the pike in me. I had never been impaled before,” he mused. “I had thought there was no new suffering. But I was to hang sixteen days more before the lord rode through and did his work, and I learned much in that time of the limitless scope of suffering.”

Lan shut her eyes again, this time pulling the memory of the meditation garden brutally close as a shield against the sympathy trying to rise.

“Sixteen days…and if not for that fellow tyrant, I might have hung years in that high, dry air. Instead, I watched the smoke above the trees and heard the distant cries as he punished an entire settlement for daring to exist on the lands he coveted. The following dawn, some forty men, women and children were brought to the field to keep me company. The girl was set beside me by men who believed me—” Azrael spread his arms and looked down at his own grey flesh, weathered and scarred, open to the bone. “—already a corpse. A rare rain brought her swallows of water and my body shielded her from the worst of the wind. Too, my flesh is abhorrent to all living things, Man, beast and bird, so while crows feasted on the eyes of living and dead alike and the village dogs came to gnaw at dangling feet, none came too near me to have at that girl. And so she lived eight days and yes,” he said savagely, “I counted them. I count every day, Lan. Ask me how many days you have passed in Haven, how many times your body has seized on mine in pleasure or how often the word ‘monster’ has slipped your mouth. I hold every accounting.”

She said nothing.

Azrael took several breaths and finally said, “When she died, the lord’s men came to take her body, intending to strip and bury it upside down in a single grave with all her village, her face pressed in disgrace to the bare buttocks of someone who had known her in life, perhaps loved her. As they reached for her, I raised my head and cursed them. They fled. But they returned. For six days more, they watched me. On the seventh, they gathered wood and set it around me to my knees. They fetched a priest to pray at me while they set the fire. There had been much rain, but at last…”

Azrael glanced at the lamp’s flame, away, and then back again. He gazed into its small light while his eyes flashed and flared. “My flesh does not burn,” he said distractedly, almost disinterestedly. “But the pike did. Ultimately, it broke beneath me and I fell into the coals. I breathed in hot ash and retched smoke, my body closed in by burning. Then I reached back—” He raised a hand, still staring into the lamp, and closed it lightly over his left collarbone. “—and caught the point of the thing that pinned me. I drew it out, inch by inch, tearing the hole of its passage wider and wider until I had it out, stained black where my blood had baked into the wood. Then I stood and staggered from my pyre. Again, they fled, all but their priest, who threw himself on his knees before me and vowed to serve ‘my’ lord Satan if only I would spare him.” Azrael returned his stare to the window. “I did not.”

“And the girl?”

“She was dead. I left her.”

“Hanging there?”

“She was dead,” he said again, without expression.

“Then why did you care what they did with her corpse? Why try to stop them from posing her with all the others?”

He did not answer.

“Would you have saved her, if you could?”

“Saved her for what?” he asked harshly. “What could she have become, an orphan in that land, that age, but a beggar and a whore? Should I have saved her only to die, made ancient before her twentieth year, in the land where the man who had her people butchered ruled, free of all consequence?”

“Why not?” Lan asked. “Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”

He recoiled. His jaw clenched. He turned his back on her.

“Say what you want about the lord in your story, but at least it was just one village, not the whole world. And he only killed them, he didn’t raise them up again. And he didn’t make you help.”

The steady rhythm of his breath broke. He turned fast and paced away from her, rubbing at his scarred face.

“You made me help, Azrael.” Each word cracked and bled in the air. “You made me a part of it.”

“You wrote yourself into this tale,” he spat over his shoulder, moving on to the next wall. “You made the bargain. I fed your people at your behest. If it had brought a lasting peace, I’ve no doubt you’d have claimed the credit, so do not attempt to slip the blame.”

“That has nothing to do—”

“It is everything!” he roared. “Everything! You made me think there could be an end to the war! You made me think I could show mercy and see tolerance returned! You…” He turned back to the window, gripping at the ledge with claws that scored grooves in the old stone. “But at the first slackening of my cruelty, this.”

“This was a few dumb kids and a lot of angry talk in some mudlump of a village and what did you do about it? You killed those boys for a crime they hadn’t committed yet to make an example no one saw and then slaughtered everyone in Mallowton to avenge an attack that hadn’t happened! You could have handled it a thousand ways! You’re making them fight back, don’t you see that?”

“Do you think I do not realize the evil that I do?” He waited for a reply and, hearing none, turned around. His eyes left tracers in the air, their brightness belying the quiet of his tone. “Do you think I do not feel its weight? And have I not done a lifetime’s penance before I ever committed the sin?”

“I’m sorry you were hurt. Believe it or not, I really am. But this is not how to end it.”

“I don’t care how it ends anymore. I just want it done.” He turned away from the window and went to retrieve his mask from the vanity. “Go below and dress for dinner. I will wait service half an hour. Do not force me to collect you.”

She tried to let him go the way it would have been done if she were the hero of this story, in silence, unmoved by him except to defiance, but when his hand touched the door, she broke and said, “Please don’t do this.”

He pulled the door open anyway, as if he too were determined to play out a part, and like her, gave up on it. His head bent. With a sigh, he shut the door and faced her. “What would you have me do? Forgive them all their treason and wait for the next attack? I know you do not consider the lives of those within Haven to be lives deserving of peace or protection…or indeed, to be lives at all…”

She could not muster even the pretense of an argument.

“But I brought them into this existence, however much I may regret it now,” he continued after her silence had stretched out long enough to hurt, “and I owe them better than to abandon them to human violence, simply because they cannot die. Whether you agree with it or not, my hungering dead are all that keep the living from my borders, and even in that, they are not wholly effective, as your presence attests. So tell me, Lan, how many deathless torments would you have my loyal dead endure as your people revenge themselves for a war they began? And how many will you share?” he demanded. “Or do you think the living will know you for a hero and not the Devil’s dollygirl?”

“I don’t care what happens to me,” she insisted.

“You should. Look around.” He took two long strides forward, gesturing toward the window with a sweep of his arm to bring the whole world into the tower with them. “See the boundless imagination and ability of man to realize his imaginings and understand that he is never so creative as when he sets another being to suffer. I was protecting you as much as any of my risen.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t use me as your excuse for killing all those innocent people.”

“Innocent? An army!”

“You keep saying that, but there are no armies out there anymore, not really. Just scared people who only want to live. And if they act like an army sometimes, maybe you need to understand it’s because they think they’re still at war.” She stood up and met him halfway across the floor before he could pace away. “And you can’t change their minds by killing everyone who’s against you.”

“I will never change their minds,” he said, then softened just a little. “Nor yours, I see. You would not be the Lan I…the Lan I know, if you could forgive what I am about to do. I will not ask. But for what I have already done, for that one night…and that one life…” He raised a hand, but did not quite touch her cheek. “Lan, I am so sorry.”

“So am I.” She turned into his waiting hand, pressing her cheek to his cool palm, and closed her eyes. “If I said I could forgive you…would you pay for it?”

He took his hand back and returned to the window. He did not speak, but made room for her when she joined him.

They stood together, not touching, watching the night. The lights were on in Haven, shining blue and gold and white. All the world used to look like that. But that world was dead and the one that had been raised up in its place was so much darker.

At last, he said, “Would you mean it?”

She took a breath that still, after all these hours, tasted of smoke and blood, and whispered, “Yes.”

“And your price?”

“Don’t do this.”

“Lan—”

“If I promise not to ask about the Eaters unless we have a formal audience? If I made you another garden or built you a building? If I begged…” Lan took a breath, then knelt down on the blood-colored planks while he watched, not quite impassive. She put her hands together, like she’d seen in some of the colored windows around the palace, and turned her face up to his. “I’m begging you. If I’m not doing it right, if I’m not sorry enough, then tell me what to do and I’ll do it and we’ll never talk about this again, I swear. Please. I’ll do anything, but please…don’t do this.”

He looked at her and for a long time, it was only the rain, the weight in her heart and the ache in her knees.

“So be it,” he said at last. “For now. I will speak to Deimos.” He offered his hand.

She took it and let him help her back to her feet. “I’ll dress for dinner.”

“You really are quite a formidable negotiator at times.” He took his lamp and went to open the door, only to close it softly. Without turning, he said, “No. I would not have saved her.”

The wind blew cold between them.

“But I would not have let her suffer eight days, if I but had another hand’s span of reach. I could not save her, but I would have ended it. And as much as you may regret the killing of that boy, it was a mercy you did, not a murder.” He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and opened the door.

“Can I come to bed with you tonight?”

He looked back with a tired sort of smile. “It is a very red room, isn’t it?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak without saying something stupid, something he wouldn’t even believe.

“Yes, you may. And be welcome. I missed you.”

He closed the door softly on his last word. She listened to his footsteps recede until the rain drowned them out.

“I missed you, too,” she said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Of all the rooms in Azrael’s palace, or at least those where Lan had been, if she had to choose a favorite, it could only be the library. She could remember thinking of it as wasted space once, but now the sheer size of it only physically represented the immensity of the knowledge it contained. Every surface was in some way beautiful, from the rich carpets over the polished floors to the elaborate tiles and cornices on the ceiling and everything in-between. She could stare at just the windows all day, imagining stories to go with the pictures that had been set so colorfully inside them, and if she ever got bored doing that, she could always ride the ladders.

The library was the only place that made Lan glad Haven existed, because it meant that room had been spared when all the rest of the world had fallen down. It made her happy, a little, to think it might survive even if humanity did not, and at the same time, it made her sad for the same reason, because no one else would ever look at those windows the same way, with the same wonder.

So it should have been a good thing that Lan had to go to the library every day, except that the reason she had to go was to have lessons. It wasn’t just because she was bad at them—she would never admit that, anyway, not even to herself—but because Master Wickham taught her absolutely nothing she needed to know. Numbers, thrown together and broke apart in quantities and variations that would never, ever exist outside of a textbook. Science, which was equal parts irrelevant and unintelligible, and which even Master Wickham confessed was mostly made up of theories. And reading. Reading was still, even after all this time, the very worst. Anytime she started to feel the least little bit confident about reading, Master Wickham found a new way to muddle it up. It wasn’t enough anymore just to know what the words meant, she had to know why and how to make them mean other things by changing the bits at the beginnings and the ends, how to make things into actions and how to make stuff that had happened into stuff that only might happen or stuff that was still happening.

With every new lesson, Lan only felt her nerves pulled tighter and thinner, so when she arrived in the library one morning to discover a fountain pen and inkwell on her side of the desk, she snapped. A pencil was the only damned thing she was absolutely the master of, and she wasn’t giving it up without a fight.

Wickham let her say everything she wanted to say on that subject, but when she came to the end of her rambling, incoherent tirade, he simply uncapped the inkwell, put the fountain pen in her hand and told her all complaints with the curriculum had to be submitted in writing. She was fairly sure that wasn’t true, but she was angry enough to plop herself down and spend the hours necessary to learn how to use the bloody thing so she could painstakingly write out Lessons is a load of useless shit. Master Wickham read it, corrected it and made her write it out a hundred times because she apparently misspelled everything except ‘a’. This took so long that by the time she showed up to dress for dinner, Serafina was in a slappy mood and it did not improve when she saw the ink smudged across Lan’s hands.

Lan spent several excruciating minutes gritting her teeth while Serafina tried to get the stains off with soap, a brush, a pumice stone and finally a slap to Lan’s face.

“What do I have to do to earn a day without your fucking attitude?” Lan demanded as her faithful servant stomped off to find a pair of gloves in the wardrobe. “Haven’t I been nice to you? All this time and you still treat me like I’m something you can’t quite scrape off your shoes!”

“Just get in the bath and don’t get your hair wet. There’s not time enough to dry it. What have you done with your blue gown?” she asked accusingly.

Lan waded over to look around the screen. “It’s right there. You’re practically touching it.”

“Not the sky blue, the deep blue! Evening colors!”

“Oh, that one. It’s being restrung or something.”

Serafina gave a disapproving sniff.

“Hey, you keep putting me in corsets, he’s going to keep cutting them off. It’s not my fault.” Lan rubbed some soap between her palms and scrubbed her face, then splashed it clean. “Why do they call it ‘sky blue’ anyway? The sky’s not blue.”

“It was once. I’m sure even you have seen pictures of the sky before.”

“Yeah, but they’re not real.”

Serafina laughed and shook her head.

“Come on, they’re not just blue in the pictures, they’re crazy colors. Red and orange and purple and pink…Are you trying to tell me the sky changed colors?”

Serafina laughed again, but the sound was forced.

Lan gave herself a last hasty splash to rinse off and climbed out of the water. “Do you really remember the old sky? None of the other dead people seem to remember anything from when they were alive.”

“There is nothing worth remembering before the ascension of our great lord.”

“Not even the color of the sky? How is that remotely disloyal to Azrael’s rule? He says he didn’t even change it.”

“He didn’t. It was your kind,” she said contemptuously, “demonstrating their humanity—burning millions, poisoning tens of millions more and souring the whole of the world they bequeathed to future generations rather than allow our great lord to live in peace with his Children.”

“So you do remember it.”

“Oh, I remember well enough the day the sky changed. I was bathing my mistress…There was no palace then,” she added in a wistful aside. “And the fine place where he so briefly stayed with his newborn Children was far behind us, but he had brought us back to the cave where he had been confined and made us a home. There was a fall, no bigger than this one,” she said, glancing at the fountain, “and it poured into a pool just so. And there, I bathed my mistress and plaited her hair while she wept for her slain sisters and brothers, when the ships first appeared. They passed over us, trailing foul streams of poison behind them. Back and forth, filling the sky with the stink, until the cloud of it was all we could see. Our lord ordered us into the cave, as deep as we could go, but we had not gone deep at all when the sky ignited.

“Flame came spilling in,” Serafina said softly, still standing at the wardrobe, but no longer rummaging through the gowns that hung there. The mirrored inner panel reflected her face in a dozen pieces. “I had never seen such flame…and never saw such again. It seemed to have a weight, rolling as it moved. It filled the cave as water fills a jar, swirling and funneling and pouring down into every hollow and channel. It should have found us, if it had been any other cave, but as I say, this was the cave of our lord’s imprisonment and he had made it his home. There was a door. He shut it against the fires as they came toward us and he held it shut, even as flames licked through every crack and turned the door beneath his hands a glowing gold. He held it and when those awful sounds and that awful light faded, he opened it and we went out together to see the sky, as black as starless night, and all the lush forest that had been our walls and roof charred away. The very rock had melted. There was nothing. Nothing.”

She fell silent. Even Lan had stopped moving. The water continued its cheerful babble, but Serafina did not seem to hear. She was far away, at the charred ruin of another bath.

“He sent us back into the cave, but he did not join us there. He was gone many days. We could hear the sounds of war, even as deep as we were hidden. The bombs…the explosions….became as a beating heart in the rock around us. It became almost a comfort to hear it, to know that so long as the world’s heart still beat, our lord yet lived. And then, that heart began to slow…and slow…and finally stop. We waited in the darkness—truly, you cannot imagine the darkness. It is so much more than the absence of light. It is a living thing, a dead thing, closed in all around you. You can hear it. Feel it. It is every sense all at once.” Serafina shuddered and suddenly seemed to notice her hands again. She moved a few gowns around and picked one out. “We waited in that darkness until our lord returned. He brought us out into the light of that new sky and yes, it was an awful light, but it was still beautiful to our eyes because we thought it was the light of peace. It wasn’t, but we thought it was. How young we were.” Serafina turned away from the wardrobe with a manufactured sigh and immediately punched a hand into her hip. “You got your hair wet, you clumsy cow!”

“But this all happened after you were already dead.”

“After I was raised up, you mean.”

“Don’t you ever wonder who you were when you were alive?”

“I know who I am now. That is all that matters.” Serafina threw a towel over her and roughly rubbed her down. Very roughly.

“But he named you,” Lan said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t do that for everyone. You must have been special.”

“The Lady Batuuli named me. I was her handmaiden.” Serafina dropped the gown over Lan’s head and cinched up the beaded corset. The black gown, the one she always put out when she was most annoyed with Lan. Black made her look too pale, which meant lots of slapping to put color in her cheeks. There were cosmetics that would do the same thing, but those took time to apply.

“You’re my handmaiden now,” Lan pointed out. “Does that mean I get to name you?”

“No.” Out came the hairbrush, which she used to neaten hair primarily by ripping it out.

Lan showed no signs of pain, since that was the surest way to prolong the torture, but she couldn’t stop herself from muttering, “I think I’ll name you ‘Bitch’.”

Serafina brushed even harder. “Of course you would. My true mistress knew only angels were fit to serve her. You are content to be tended by dogs.” She turned away, reaching for the jeweled combs to pin her hair up and dropped the brush. She didn’t pick it up either, or finish setting Lan’s hair. She just stood there, silent.

“Hello, Azrael,” Lan guessed, putting her gloves on. “We didn’t hear you come in.”

“So it would seem.”

“I know I’m late, but my lessons went long and I still had to come back and get dollied up,” she said lightly. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”

“Before whom?” His footsteps approached, unhurried. He gathered up a length of her hair and pinned it with a comb. “Whose approval are you seeking? Who among my court has made you feel my esteem is not enough?”

Lan sighed.

“Perhaps you know,” Azrael said ominously, his hands ever gentle. “A devoted handmaiden knows her mistress’s mind, surely.”

“I am your humble servant, my lord,” Serafina replied, bowing.

“Are you indeed?” He put the second comb in Lan’s hair and tucked a last rebel strand behind her ear. “I find your humility somewhat lacking this evening.”

“How do I look?” Lan asked, hoping to distract him. She turned in a small circle, stepping between him and Serafina.

He wasn’t fooled and he let her know it with a long stare, but he smiled at the end of it. “Beautiful, as ever. You are quite striking in black.”

“You think so?”

“It always seems to bring out the color in your cheek.” Azrael moved behind the bathing screen. In silhouette, he removed his golden mask and put on the black wolf one. Just to match her, maybe. “I’m not decided how I feel about the gloves.”

“I’m writing with a pen now. I got ink on my hands.”

“Ah. Your handmaiden should have tended to that.” Making a last adjustment to the fastens, Azrael came back out into the room and let his gaze fall on Serafina. “Perhaps I should appoint another to her position and give this one time to meditate upon the importance of one’s work.”

Lan drew back, her thoughts at once pinned—impaled—to the meditation garden as she’d seen it last. The smell of smoke. The taste of blood. The boy from Mallowton becoming an Eater right in front of her…reaching for her…

Azrael glanced at her, then took a longer look. “A poor choice of words,” he said after a moment. “I meant only to put her at work elsewhere.”

He did not say more than that. Although it had been nearly a month since the garden, the only time they had ever talked about it had been that night in the Red Room. She’d had a thousand opportunities to bring it up again, but she hadn’t and she’d let him change the subject every time one of them had stumbled, like now, into adjoining territory. She told herself more talk couldn’t rebuild Mallowton’s walls or bring dead boys to life, which was true. She also told herself she was a coward who did not want to think about how much blood and ash stained the hands that moved over her body at night, and that was true too.

All the same, she occasionally made an effort. In this world without graves, talk was all that kept memories alive. Without it, the past, as Azrael so often said, was dead.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” she said. “When you say ‘meditate’—”

“In any event, I mean it now,” he interrupted, a warning in his tone that quickly transferred itself to Serafina. “Although I confess to some confusion as to why you should concern yourself with one who can be readily replaced.”

“So can I, remember?”

That seemed to give him pause, but only for a moment. “I remember saying I would feel a lack.”

“And that you wouldn’t suffer it long. Plenty of sweeter fruit on the tree.”

“Hm.” He offered her his ‘charming’ smile through the fangs of his mask. “You really are beautiful in that dress.”

“Thanks. Leave my handmaiden alone.”

Azrael threw an unforgiving glance at Serafina, who bowed herself swiftly from the room.

“She’s not so bad,” Lan said after an uncomfortable minute. “She’s just a little tetchy because I’m so late. She takes her responsibilities seriously.”

“Stop defending her.” His sharp tone softened. “She does not require defense.”

She nodded, fussing with her gloves. They didn’t feel right—too tight on the fingers, too loose on the wrists, not long enough. Tailored for someone else, she thought. It made her feel…something. “Did you actually come all the way down here just to walk me to dinner?” she asked lightly, loudly. “That’s kind of dovey.”

“No.”

She tugged at her glove some more. “Oh.”

“I saw you running through the halls and thought something had upset you.” His head tipped. “Shall I?”

“Shall you what, upset me? No, let’s give that a miss for tonight. For the novelty of it.”

“Shall I walk you to dinner?” he asked patiently. “If it charms you so.”

She could feel herself blush and to hide it, she headed for the door. “I don’t know about that, it’s just that no one ever has before.”

“In Norwood, you mean.”

“Yeah.” She tossed out a shrug. “To be honest, I think it’s silly. The dovey stuff people do.”

“Do you?” He fell into step beside her, idly acknowledging the salutes and bows of the guards they passed. “I find that when people feel it necessary to preface their words with an avowal of honesty, they are usually lying.”

“I’m not,” she said, annoyed.

“I said usually, not always.”

“Why would you even mention it if you didn’t think I was lying?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You just did!”

He gave her a minute to work that out.

“You’re an ass,” she told him, nettled. “Notice I didn’t say, ‘To be honest,’ first.”

“You must not mean it.”

“I can never tell whether you’re picking a fight or just in a good mood when you get like this,” she remarked. “How long were you standing there before we saw you?”

His smile went out like the sun behind a cloud, taking light and warmth with it. “Long enough.”

She walked beside him, stealing glances from the corner of her eye, trying to see through the damn mask to gauge the mood beneath. “We were talking about the sky. The old sky, I mean. Do you remember it?”

“I remember everything.” Still cold. Still dark.

“What color was it? For real?”

“All of them. A different color every hour of every day.”

“You’re funning me.” A thought struck. “Did you have a favorite sky color?”

His lip twitched. “White.”

“Still white.”

“The habits of a lifetime make all men predictable and mine has been longer than most.”

“Why a white sky?”

“Because I saw it so rarely, I suppose. And because it made the world seem empty. It was best in winter, with snow on the ground…and the mist close on every side, blotting out all but this tree, this jut of rock…all scarcely there, as if sketched in by the hand of an idle painter and then abandoned. I could stand for hours under a white sky, imagining I were all that was left.”

Lan tried not to say it, she really did. “That sounds awful.”

He shrugged. “Wait and see. The sky will clear. You will see its limitless design for yourself and develop your own preference.”

“That’s going to be so weird,” she mused, looking out a window as they passed it, imagining a blue sky in place of the bilious yellow that had always been there. Although now that she thought about it, it did change a little. On foggy mornings, it was more greyish than yellow. At dusk and dawn, it had a rosier tint. The stars had been out all Lan’s life, but she remembered her mother telling her they hadn’t been visible for first few years after the ascension. So maybe she would see a blue sky someday. And orange. And purple. And white. A different color every hour of every day.

“Do you suppose we’ll get it all back eventually?” she asked. “Cinemas and zoos and sports and all that?”

“Some,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Not all. The world turns back on itself more often than people realize, but never all the way.”

“Just as well, I guess. I don’t think I could ever live in a city like they show in the books. Norwood was about as big as I could handle.”

“And Haven?” he inquired, beginning to smile again.

“Dead people don’t live the same way. You know what I mean,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got enough people to be a real city, but you don’t have the city stuff.”

“Cinemas,” he guessed.

“Because they don’t want them. Do you want them?”

“I have learned to live without them.”

“That isn’t what I asked. Haven’t you ever wanted to see a zoo?”

“No.”

“Bad example. I forgot you don’t like animals.”

“They don’t like me,” he corrected. “I’m fond enough of them that I don’t enjoy seeing them made captive for my own viewing pleasure.”

“I think I’d like to see one anyway. The only animals I ever saw were the kind you eat. And rats.”

“Shall I have a zoo built for you here on the palace grounds?”

She looked at him, but he seemed to be serious. “No,” she said, frowning. “Not just for me. That’s…not right. Here.” She stuck out her arm defiantly. “Want to hold my hand?”

He looked at it like it was a snake and moved ahead of her without speaking.

Lan lowered her arm and picked at her dress. “Sometimes in Norwood, people hold hands.”

No response.

“I guess once you actually start fucking, you don’t need to do any of that dovey stuff.” She walked behind him, watching her toes wink in and out under the hem of her long skirts rather than his unyielding back. “Mom told me once the only kiss she could remember was the one her mother gave her when she put her on the boat. She never kissed a boy or let a boy kiss her because she wanted to remember it. She told me that, but you know? She never kissed me either. It made me so angry—well, not angry, exactly, but close—I went out behind the drying shed with Eithon Fairchild.” She made a face and shook her head. “I told him he could kiss me if he wanted. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something nice. I’d see Eithon walking with Bess or Elvie and sometimes holding her hand and I wanted that so bad. Mine were always dirty.”

She raised her hands to look at them now. Gloved. Because they were stained. She sighed and let them drop again.

“So I told him he could kiss me and he grabbed my tits and stuck his wormy tongue right down my gob until I gagged on it. I tried to push him away and he pushed me back, so I fell down and when I was on my knees, he climbed on me and pretended like he was dog-humping me. He was laughing. Then he pushed me all the way over and left me there and later I saw him walking Elvie to the cookhouse when the dinner bell rang. He was holding her hand and she was smiling.” Lan shrugged. “I don’t care. Elvie Peters is a git.”

He reached the corner that took them out of this hall and waited there, so that they turned into the next hall together. He resumed walking at her side. He still didn’t speak.

“I like to think I’m not a git,” Lan said. “I know you think I am—”

“I do not.”

“Well, you think it’s stupid of me to keep asking for audiences when your answer never changes.”

“Hm.”

“But I like to think I’m not utterly useless, you know? Maybe I’m not smart, but I’m not an idiot either. Like being alive or dead…there’s degrees, you know?”

He gave her a frowning glance.

“Sometimes I wonder if maybe the reason you give me all these nice clothes and offer to build me zoos and such is because you really just want to be with me. And if that’s true,” she went on as he put a bit more distance between them, “then I figured you’d ought to know by now that I hate wearing dresses and I don’t guess I’d want to see animals in cages either, but if you want to be with me, that’s all right.”

“How comforting. And how unnecessary. You came to me as clay. I shape you according to my desire and I need take none of it by proxy. I dress you for the pleasure of looking at you. You take lessons so that I might have the pleasure of educated conversation in the future. And whatever whim moves me, whether it be to see you dance or game with you or converse in any of the hundreds of tongues known to me, so shall you be cast.” He uttered a sound a little too sour to be a laugh. “Truly, you should be grateful my desires are not wholly physical. I know my touch—”

“—is loathsome,” she finished for him. “No, it isn’t. Hey.” She caught his arm.

He stopped walking, but did not immediately turn to face her and when he finally did, the only thing he let her see was his impatience, even when she took his hand and placed it on her bare skin, just below the hollow of her throat.

“Am I lying?” she challenged, staring straight into his eyes. “Do I loathe this?”

“Let us examine.” He moved his hand lower, hooking the neckline of her gown on his thumb and pulling it down until his palm pressed against her breastbone. “Your heart is quickening,” he observed. “Your muscles, tightening. You have always been delightfully responsive, but even you shudder in my embrace.”

“And writhe,” she agreed. “And moan. But there are more reasons to moan than with horror.”

“A point.” He slid his hand beneath her gown and her corset’s stiff constraint to cup her breast and feel for himself her stiffening nipple. “A fair point. You have the intriguing habit of using honesty against me in the most unexpected ways. A formidable weapon in the right hands.” His own gently kneaded once and then released her. “But even the sharpest weapon is useless if it cannot strike a mortal blow. So come, child. There will be time enough to talk…and touch…later. Dinner is waiting.”

Lan adjusted her gown. “You’re lucky I’m hungry or we’d have this out. Are you going to hold my hand or not?”

“No. Do you miss Norwood?”

“Why do you have to say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like it tastes bad.”

He scowled. “I don’t. Do you miss it? I would not have thought your life there to be a happy one, yet it is all you seem to talk about.”

“Sorry. Am I being tiresome?” she asked, annoyed.

“Answer my question.”

“No. Sometimes. Sort of. Not really.”

He threw her a bewildered glance and a crooked smile in spite of his obvious irritation. “Am I meant to pick the answer I like best?”

“I miss…I don’t know…the memory of Norwood. I hated it when I was actually there. Maybe if I had mates, it would be different, but I was never really one of them.”

“Hm.”

“My mother…she wasn’t one of them either, but she could have been. She was foreign, but she made them respect her. She was…” There were so many ways to end that, so many memories, but they all ended in the bonfire. Lan looked away, studying her reflection in the many shiny surfaces they passed—the soft face, the fine gown. “She wasn’t like me. She had her own place there. I just had part of hers. And when she died…sometimes I think I left to spare them all the embarrassment of throwing me out.”

He chuckled, looked at her and laughed aloud. “Until you said that, I never really believed you were British.”

As they came into the next corridor, Lan could see two pikemen and another guard in a uniform whose variations were unfamiliar to her, which was in itself strange enough to draw her eye. The three of them were clustered together at the far end of the hall along with Azrael’s steward, and although Lan could not hear them, their tension was obvious as they conferred.

“What do you suppose that’s about?” she asked.

Azrael didn’t even look to see what she was referring to. “If it is important, someone will tell me.”

“My lord, a word?”

Azrael halted, fixing her with an undeservedly blameful stare before turning around. He folded his arms and assumed his most forbidding stance as his steward approached them at what could only be called a trot. He asked no questions, merely waited.

“Forgive the intrusion upon your…er…” The dead man’s gaze darted toward Lan and away again. “Perhaps your companion would be more comfortable in the dining hall while my lord attends to this, ah, minor matter.”

Lan took a neutralizing pause before smiling at Azrael. “Something you don’t want me to hear?”

“This is none of my doing,” Azrael replied with a convincing frown. “What news? Speak.”

The dead man looked at Lan again, then grit his teeth and said, “My lord, I’ve just had a message from the gate.”

Azrael’s fingers drummed on his bicep.

“They’ve had, ah, an arrival. Which is to say a human. Living. Two of them, actually.”

Azrael spat out what could only be a curse, even if Lan did not recognize the language. “Take them back to their village and when they are there, shove their guns down their throats, impale them to their ferry and set them on fire. Not a word!” he snapped at Lan, who had only just opened her mouth. “Let their fellows see the fate of those who dare to strike against me! If there is any resistance, if there is so much as one stone thrown or one insult spoken—”

“Azrael, no!”

The steward took advantage of Lan’s interruption to bow and loudly blurt out, “Forgive me, lord, but they had no guns, only a hunting knife immediately surrendered. They were not attempting to enter Haven by stealth. Their ferry dropped them at some short distance and they walked to the gate.”

Azrael leaned back and cocked his head. “What,” he said after a lengthy pause to consider, “a fantastically foolish thing to do in the wake of recent events. What do they want?”

“An audience, sire. More than that, I do not know. Shall I have the gatewatch bring them here?”

“No. Release them.” Azrael turned, beckoning to Lan as he resumed his walk.

“Don’t you even want to hear what they have to say?” Lan asked.

“I’ve heard it,” he replied, unmoved and incurious. “A hundred times over from dozens of different throats, including yours.”

“But what if they—”

“Lan, come.”

Lan reluctantly followed him, twisting around to keep watching the steward bow and fidget. He started to walk away, raked a hand through his hair, and abruptly turned and came after them. “My lord, I must recommend you receive these visitors.”

“Visitors.” Azrael threw out a curt laugh. “Beggars at my gate are not guests, and even guests I am not obligated to receive with grace. I reward their audacity with their lives and that, surely, is reward enough. Send them away.”

“My lord, I must strongly—”

“Am I in the habit of granting audiences to beggars, steward?” Azrael asked without stopping.

Lan glanced back to intercept the troubled look the steward sent her way. “You’ve done it before,” she pointed out.

“Hush,” he told her, not without a smile. “I would say you’ve grown too bold in your speech, but you came to me this way.”

“I also came as a beggar to your gate.”

“You had no such respect. You trespassed into my city, invaded my palace, insulted me and made arrogant demands.”

“That’s a good point. When was the last time someone just up and knocked on Haven’s door?”

“More often than one would think.” He shook his head. “It matters not. I grant only one audience each day, and tonight, it is promised to you.”

“Are you going to end the Eaters tonight?”

“No.”

Lan shrugged. “Then they can have it.”

“You overstep yourself.”

“You just said you gave one audience a day. You don’t have one scheduled tonight, so now you have to hear them.”

“I don’t even have to hear you,” he replied with a pointed glance. But he raised his voice to reach his steward, still trotting after them. “What do they want?”

“No one ever asks for an audience because they’re so happy,” said Lan.

Azrael’s jaw clenched. “Ah yes. Life is bleak, the dead are an abomination and I am a monster. Now I don’t even need to meet with them.”

The steward must have agreed, because he actually wrung his hands and suddenly called out, “She claims to come from Mallowton, lord.”

Lan and Azrael both stopped mid-stride. They looked at each other, then turned, still in sync, to look at him.

“She,” Azrael echoed. “You said there were two.”

“A woman, sire, and a child.”

Azrael’s frown deepened. “From Mallowton.”

“So they claim, my lord.”

Softly, so very softly, Azrael said, “Do I know this woman?”

The steward didn’t seem to know how to answer and the silence only grew heavier the longer he made it last.

“Fetch Deimos,” were the words that finally broke it. Azrael’s hands creaked like old leather as he drew them into hooked fists. “And bring my…guests…to the dining hall.”

Without waiting to receive his steward’s bow of obedience, Azrael stalked away, forcing Lan to follow at what was almost a run or be left behind.

“What are you going to do to them?” she asked.

He did not answer.

She caught his arm. “Azrael, whatever you’re thinking—”

He shook her off.

“You can’t—”

He swung around so fast that she instinctively threw up one arm to ward off the blow. He froze, his anger dissipating at once, as Lan tried to pretend she had only been scratching at her hair.

After a long, uncomfortable silence, he said, “You cannot ask me for mercy.”

“These people have done nothing wrong! It isn’t mercy to not punish someone for someone else’s mistake.”

“Mistake? The youths of Mallowton did not offend a fairy as they set off for their fields and magically arrive at Haven’s gate with guns! I fed them!” he snarled. “Would you not call that an overture of peace? And would you not agree that it was rejected, violently?”

“And punished!” She touched his arm again and again, he raised it, but this time did not pull free, although his eyes burned hotter. “I know you think you were making an example out of them—”

“Enough! You swore you would not speak of this!”

“—but all you did was slaughter a village!” she finished stubbornly. “No one else will ever know why! What you did…” Her throat tightened with the remembered stink of ash and blood. It was several seconds before she was able to force her next words out. “Your anger may have been justified, but when no one is left to tell the story, the story will always be, ‘Azrael sent Revenants to brutally murder every man, woman and child in Mallowton for no damned reason!’”

“Men need no reason to murder, but I must have one?”

“Only if you want to believe you’re better than the worst of them.”

He paced away as far as the next window and leaned against the frame, seemingly just to have something to scrape at with his claws. “Your mouth,” he muttered, glaring at her over his shoulder.

“All I’m asking you to do is hear them out.”

“No, it isn’t. You want me to hear them, agree with them, spare them and give them whatever they demand of me, and moreover, you want me to do it according to your definition of what is reasonable, which is to say, whatever most benefits my enemy!” His voice had been rising steadily so that his final word was a shout, punctuated by his fist slamming into the wall, but after that he was quiet. His eyelight, reflected in the window glass, flickered and faded. His fingers drummed. He glanced back at her. “If I were to hear them, would you pay for their audience?”

“Yes,” said Lan, going to him without hesitation. “What do you want me to do?”

“Firstly.” He pointed one claw at her, so that the tip nearly touched the sensitive place between her eyes. “You will not speak so long as they stand in my presence. I will hear whatever argument you wish to make afterwards—for days, no doubt,” he added sourly, “but you will remember this is not your audience and be silent for theirs.”

“Fine.”

“At your first word, you will be removed and my promise of passage shall be revoked.”

“I said, fine!”

“Very fine.” He lowered his hand and smiled at her. She had come to find over her long stay in Haven that Azrael had many smiles, most of them with at least some degree of real humor behind them. This was not one of them. “Secondly, you must eat.”

Lan waited, her brows knitting, but he just smiled his unpleasant smile at her. “Is that it?” she asked finally.

“Bear in mind that whatever else happens tonight, you and I will end it in one another’s close company. I will hear your empty belly’s every complaint.”

“What makes you think I won’t eat?”

“I think only you may find it difficult once you see her.” His smile twisted even thinner. “And once she sees you.”

They resumed their walk in silence that lasted all the way to the dining hall. As he entered, even as the gathered dead were rising noisily to make their formal genuflections, he said, “Clear the court. Guards, remain at your posts.”

“No witnesses?” Lan asked as the hall swiftly emptied.

“That should comfort you. I don’t mind making public displays of my tyranny. It’s acts of mercy I regret. Clear this,” he ordered, indicating the feast laid out over the imperial table. “Tonight, we serve in courses. But leave the rest.”

“That’s sadistic,” said Lan, remembering only too well how it had felt to see all that food—see it, smell it, all but taste it—the first time she’d set foot in this hall.

“Remind me to congratulate Wickham on his improvements to your vocabulary. Sit, Lan, and be silent.”

She sat beside him. Servants came to fill their cups. Azrael helped himself to a sampling of the starters and watched the door.

Soon, Deimos arrived. He marched toward them, showing no reaction to either the near-empty hall or the obvious black mood of his lord, but went straight to the dais and down on one knee. He waited, his neck bent and one hand on the hilt of his sword, motionless.

Azrael ate another canapé and watched the door.

Silence, deafening as only the worst silences are. No one breathed but Lan. No one moved but Azrael.

At last, an eternity after he had left, the steward returned. “My lord, as requested, the…ah, the envoy,” he said with some satisfaction. “From Mallowton.”

Deimos looked sharply around.

The person who timidly answered the steward’s impatient wave was so small, Lan thought at first it was the child he had mentioned, until the real child came in hugging at her hip. Large eyes seemed even larger sunk in the hollows of the woman’s thin face, especially as she stared at what must seem to her a twinned mile of tables groaning with food. Ill-fitting, over-patched clothes only emphasized her thin frame. She wore her filthy mat of dark hair cropped short. The child’s was longer, tied back with string; a girl.

Lan looked at Azrael and saw only confusion beneath the snarling wolf’s face that he showed to the world.

“I don’t know you,” he said, almost as if to himself. His eyes flickered, then steadied. He beckoned and raised his voice to fill the hall with a curt, “Approach me.”

The woman flinched at the sound and Lan’s heart gave a little twinge of sympathy. She had never heard echoes before coming to the palace either. It must seem as though Azrael’s voice itself had this unfathomable, inhuman quality.

She crept forward, clutching the child’s hand tightly in hers, staring in hungry awe at everything around her and shivering whenever her gaze tapped up against one of the dead. When she looked at Lan, her step faltered and her mouth opened in a round o of despair.

The weight of Lan’s gown, the cleanness of it, squeezed at her, making it hard to breathe.

“Here,” Azrael said, pointing at the shining tiles beside the still-kneeling Revenant staring daggers up at her. “Come before me and speak.”

The woman took her last steps and, after a shuddering glance at Deimos, lowered herself painfully to her knees. “My lord—”

“Louder.”

“My lord, I come to ask—”

“No, no. That is not the way. Begin again.”

“M-My lord?”

“If I am your lord, you do not come before me and speak immediately of the demands you mean to make. First, you give your oath and then offer your gift of tribute.” Azrael waved a servant over with the first course of his meal. Beef broth, rich and full of flavor. “Only then, if I am satisfied as to your fealty, shall I consider hearing any requests.”

The woman huddled on her knees, watching the spoon travel between the golden bowl and black mask. The sound of her breathing was very loud, but she said nothing.

Another bowl was set before Lan. She could feel Azrael’s attention, even if he didn’t look at her. She told herself she had never felt less like eating and it was the truth. She told herself she wasn’t even hungry, but that was a lie. It was a lie and Azrael would know it. She touched her soup spoon, but the thought of eating in front of this woman and her child made her nauseous and never mind her grumbling belly. She’d eat later. Broth wasn’t real food anyway.

Lan put her hands in her lap and kept her mouth tightly shut.

Azrael smiled, although he never looked at her. He kept his gaze fixed on the woman kneeling before him, impaling her with his eyes as effectively as with a pike. “No oath?”

“I…I don’t know how…”

“No tribute?”

“Please, I’ve come a long way—”

“Now where have I heard that before?” he asked, staring at Lan. “Ah yes. From everyone. Why is that? Is distance some indicator of obligation? I came a long way, woman. I came through black rain and burning streets and across the dividing sea, and how was I met? Why should I meet you any better?”

“I…Please.”

“Still. You’re here.” He tapped his spoon twice on the side of his broth bowl and put it aside. “Your name?”

“Mary. My lord.”

“Painfully common. And who is this?”

The woman’s grip tightened on the child’s hand enough that she whimpered and squirmed. “Heather.”

“Slightly less common.” Azrael moved his cup to make room for the next course—poached fish in cream. “You needn’t hold her so close. She can’t run far.”

With obvious reluctance, the woman released the child’s hand. Little Heather promptly grabbed on to the ragged corner of the woman’s shirt instead and stuck her thumb in her mouth, staring with hungry eyes at the mountains of food on the nearest table.

“I’m told you come from Mallowton,” Azrael said, taking an herbed roll from the bowl and tossing it onto the lower floor.

The child pounced on it, ate it in three huge bites, then climbed onto the dais and approached him sideways, stretching out her wasted claw of an arm.

The woman’s hands twitched and gripped at her own sleeves in an obvious effort to keep from reaching after her. “Yes, my lord.”

Deimos said nothing, but his eyes narrowed.

“Mallowton,” mused Azrael. “I have difficulty believing that. Captain, how did this woman escape you?”

“I would like to know that as well, my lord,” said Deimos, boring his unblinking stare into the side of Mary’s head like it was a knife he could twist.

“So. It would seem you have a story to tell.” Azrael dissected his fish expertly and pulled out the spine, gently discouraging the child from scavenging it, but allowing her to drag her dirty fingers through the pool of cream sauce on his plate. “We’re all attention, aren’t we, Heather?”

The woman’s mouth trembled, but she did not speak.

“Very well. I’ll start. Were you aware—Lan, is the meal not to your liking?”

She opened her mouth to tell him she didn’t like creamed fish, and only when his eyes sparked did she remember her promise not to speak. Did that still count, since he’d asked her a question? Unsure, she miserably picked up her fork, scraped off a tiny flake of fish and touched it to her lips.

“Were you aware I had sent my Revenants to your village?” Azrael continued evenly. “Or were you by chance visiting relations in another settlement?”

The woman tore her eyes from Lan’s food. “I was there, my lord.”

“And do you know why I sent them?”

She hesitated and shook her head.

Azrael’s jaw clenched. “No? It was an entirely unprovoked attack, is that what you suggest?”

Her eyes flashed wide. “No, my lord.”

“It must be. If you know of nothing at all that could have warranted my attention—” He glanced at Lan. “Forgive me, one moment. Kitchen. We’re ready for the next course.”

The servants whispered in and out again, transforming the fish into filet mignon in port sauce. Lan took up her knife and fork with all the enthusiasm of a woman about to carve into her own leg. It bled when she cut it. She wished it could have tasted of ashes, but it was very good, which made it even harder to swallow.

“Go on,” said Azrael, carving his own filet in two pieces, not quite equal. He offered the larger share to the child, who snatched it off his fork and retreated under the table to eat.

“There were…strangers in town.”

“Yes?”

“There were some calling themselves…like an army. They were talking themselves around some. I didn’t listen!” she insisted. “There’s none in Mallowton who would give ear to a bunch of foreigners with mad ideas as that!”

“As what, exactly?”

The woman’s mouth worked without sound.

“I grow impatient,” Azrael remarked. “And I dislike repeating myself. Did you know there were insurgents in Mallowton?”

“Yes, lord.”

“Did you know they meant to come here?”

The woman bent her neck and nodded.

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Yes, my lord…but I swear I was not a part of it! I heard talk, that’s all!”

“You didn’t see the ferries, then?” Azrael buttered one half of another herbed roll and offered the rest to the girl, who scraped butter off the dish with her hand and licked it up between huge bites of bread. “Or the guns? Did you perhaps know the youths?”

“M-My lord?”

“The youths, or perhaps I should say the vanguard of Mallowton’s army.”

“I…I was no part of it. I didn’t even know which boys meant to go until they left!”

“It was Peter and Yancy, mum,” said the girl around a mouthful of butter.

Azrael looked at her with idle interest, then past her. His thin smile died. His eyes flickered.

“Also Plix and Janner and Olson,” the girl continued, although Azrael no longer seemed to be listening. Her little hand stabbed into his plate and out again with the last bite of beef. “But mostly Peter and Yancy.”

“Lan?” Azrael reached out and touched her wrist.

Lan blinked at him and only then realized she had been holding her fork halfway to her mouth for several seconds, untasted. Her hand, she saw, was shaking. She let him help her put it down, but picked up her cup and pretended to drink. Peter. Yancy. Plix. Janner. Olson. But there had been seven pikes in the garden. They must have picked up the rest at a waystation, stopping in to charge their ferry’s battery and maybe take a drop of beer, talking the kind of big talk that puts a shine in the eyes of boys even younger and dumber than they were. And she’d killed one of them. Yancy, she decided. He’d looked like a Yancy. The pikeman had killed Plix. And Olson…Olson had been on the fire.

Azrael returned his steady stare to the woman. “It would seem you listen to the wrong gossip. Ah, I appear to be finished. Kitchen.”

The servants cleared the plates—his, picked clean and hers, virtually untouched—and brought fruit and cheeses. Even before the tower was on the table, the girl had a bunch of grapes and was stuffing them into her mouth with both hands.

“M-My lord, you must believe me—”

“I must do nothing. Moreover, I will do nothing if you lie to me again, save it be to send you out from my city. Lan, you’re not eating.”

She reached out blindly, snatching a fruit from the bowl and biting into it without seeing what she had. Peach juice flooded her mouth. She gagged and spit it onto her plate. Azrael ignored her. Instead, he drank his wine while the woman babbled apologies and pleas, and when his cup was empty, he slammed it down and roared, “Do not lie to me!”

The woman scrambled back on all fours and huddled, weeping. The child jumped off the dais, scattering her grapes, but when she decided she was in no immediate danger, she warily climbed back on and approached the imperial table with her hand out.

Azrael selected an apple and gave it to her. She retreated under the table, where nothing could be seen of her except one foot and nothing heard but the gnawing of her little teeth.

“Now then,” said Azrael. “I will ask again and for the last time. Did you know why I sent my Revenants to your village?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know your village was preparing an attack on Haven?”

“Y-Yes.”

“Did you know the youths who set out to murder me?”

The woman nodded. “But I couldn’t stop them, sir! I swear I couldn’t!”

“Did you try?”

The woman’s mouth worked, speechless.

“No. So in point of fact, we will never know if you could have stopped them. They were only boys,” he remarked with a slight frown. “They were foolish…and they were frightened. Perhaps they were only waiting for someone to tell them to stop.” He glanced at Lan and picked up his fork, spearing a wedge of edam and applying it to a slice of pear. “But we’ll never know. The deed was done and consequence meted. And yet, here you are. How did that happen?”

“I—I don’t…”

“If you tell me you don’t know, I will end you and this audience together. You were there, woman. You escaped a man—”

Deimos rose to his feet and drew his sword, all in one movement.

“—whose loyalty and obedience are beyond all doubt and whose skill in the deadly arts are unmatched by the living or the dead. Yet you eluded him. In effect, you bested him. Which means you bested me. And I want to know how that was done.”

Lan felt a tug on her gown. Lifting the edge of the tablecloth, she looked down into the girl’s dirty face.

“Give me a drink,” the girl whispered.

Lan glanced at Azrael, but he was still focused on the weeping woman. She caught his attention only when she took her water glass and passed it down, and even then, he only grunted.

The girl drank without hesitation. She didn’t even ask if it was clean and she was plenty old enough to know she should.

“Woman, if I have to ask once more—”

“Mercy, my lord! I beg you, mercy!”

“Mercy is for those who earn it. Answer the question.”

“I did not plan to escape, my lord! I swear it! I swear I only fled in panic!”

“Your word means nothing to me. You swore there was no rebellion growing in Mallowton and there was. You swore you did not know the youths who set out ahead of them and you did. You swore you could not stop them and you never tried. You could swear me the sun rises in the east and I would give it no weight. You are a liar, woman, and you have this one final chance to perhaps earn your life and no more. Answer.”

“When the bells rang, we all went to the hostel, but I didn’t have enough money.”

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t seem to know how to answer, which Lan could understand. It was like having to explain why you had to ask if the water was clean before you drank it. It was just life, that was all. And a life you had always lived was one you never questioned.

“The hostel,” the woman stammered. “It’s the safe place. The bells rang and we all went to the hostel, but you have to pay—three for standing room, ten for a cell with a door.”

“Three of what?”

“Why, goldslip, sir,” she managed after a brief, baffled pause. “There’s some who still take the coin of the old realm, but not in Mallowton. There, it’s mostly barter. I never have more than a hand can hold after harvest, and then the sheriff took a tax of twenty when my Da’ died, for he came over sudden-like and no one was there to do for him. He rose up…” She stammered to a stop, blushing high in her cheeks. “I had to pay the fine, so I only had two’slip when the Revenants came. It wasn’t enough.”

“Do you still have them?”

Her blush spread in blotches. “One, sir. I…I thought I might have to…to bribe the gate, but I never did, sir!”

Azrael laughed. “No, you never did. There is no need for coin in Haven and no desire for it.” He put out his hand.

The woman clutched at her sleeve, then bent her neck. Fingers trembling, she tore at the worn stitching of her cuff and shook out a single coin. Scarcely had it touched her palm before Deimos had it and carried it to the table.

Azrael took it and rolled it between his fingers with a look of great interest. “Is this meant to be me?”

Lan and the woman both nodded.

“A surprisingly becoming likeness.” Azrael put the coin beside his plate and gestured to the woman. “Proceed.”

“I begged the sheriff to let us in, but he said there wasn’t room. The walls fell. I could hear the men shouting and shooting…and screaming. The sheriff closed the hostel doors and everyone still outside began to run. People were crushed up against the doors or knocked down by others trying to escape. Old women, children…trampled in the mud.”

“Tragic. And you? Where were you?”

“I ran, sir. Wherever there were screams, I ran the other way. Behind the cookhouse, there were barrels. I emptied them and we hid inside. It was all I could think of.”

Azrael held up one hand to stop her and turned to Deimos. “A barrel,” he said flatly.

Azrael had claimed his Revenants had no sense of pity and no capacity to be disloyal, but apparently they did have a sense of honor and could take offense when it was impugned. Deimos actually took a breath and let it all the way out before he took another and said, “My lord, we searched every barrel, bin, crate and grain sack. If it could hold even an infant, it was opened. That they escaped me is undeniable, but they did not do it in a barrel.”

Azrael turned his gaze back on the woman. “Did you?”

“We hid there until the Eaters were…done. Then the Revenants came.” The woman hesitated a glance at Deimos and shivered. “They began to search the lodges and burn them. The smoke was so thick. I could hear the Eaters, but I couldn’t see them. I knew we couldn’t hide forever. I took my children and ran where the smoke was thickest.”

“Children?”

The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears, but they did not fall. “Brandon,” she said. The word tore in her throat and each word that followed came out bleeding. “He couldn’t run fast enough. And I couldn’t carry them both.” She reached up a trembling hand to touch her eyes and looked at her dry fingertips. “I had to choose.”

Azrael tapped his thumbclaw on the side of his plate and finally waved a servant over. “Give her water,” he ordered.

“Is it clean?” the woman asked, then clapped a hand over her mouth in horror as she realized what she’d said.

“It is,” Azrael replied, unoffended. “So. You survived the annihilation of Mallowton. You had a new chance at life.” His head tipped. “And you came here. Why?”

“I-I knew you would find me eventually. The Revenants never fail.”

“How gracious of you to say,” Azrael said coolly. “Why did you really come?”

The servant arrived with the promised water. With a dozen cups standing free on every side, she had gone to the kitchen for a plain, unadorned glass. What was meant for the dead was too good for the living. The woman accepted it meekly, but hardly drank. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the glass and water overspilled its sides as she shook.

Azrael drummed his fingers, then leaned back and lifted the tablecloth. “Heather. Come here.”

“Please, my lord, don’t hurt my daughter! She’s all I have!”

“Be silent.” He extended his open hand. “Come, child. Stand here before me.”

Heather’s small hand slipped into his. She crawled out into the light and quickly stepped away, wiping her hand on the side of her thigh. Her lip was a little curled with idle disgust, but her eyes were only curious.

“Tell me,” said Azrael, offering her a cheese tartlet. “How did you come to my city?”

“In a van. Mum called it a ferry,” the girl added scornfully, “but it didn’t have a name or no picture on the side like a real ferry has. It was just a van.”

“Where did you board the van?”

“In Fords. We took a real ferry to Fords. The Screaming Sally.”

“And where did you board the Sally?” Azrael inquired, looking at the woman.

“Some place,” the girl said disinterestedly, sniffing her tartlet. “It was dark and we weren’t there long.”

“How many ferries did you ride to come here?”

The girl shrugged, her mouth too full to talk.

“And where did you board the first of them?”

“I dunno. It was open ground.” The girl quieted, looking at her last bite of tartlet as from a great distance. “The morning after Bran…fell down.”

“But eventually, you came to Fords and the van brought you here?”

The girl found a grape on the floor and ate it. “Oh, there were lots of other places first. Alaighcroft and Camfork and I forget the rest.” Her thin face scrunched up with thought. “Celtscross. And some other place…Sexy.”

Azrael’s smile went crooked. “You mean a waystation.”

“No, not a sex-place,” said the girl with lofty disdain. “That was just the name of the town. Sexy.”

“Iversex,” whispered the woman.

“Ah. So if I were to ask Deimos here, he would no doubt assure me you went to all these other villages because they were on the way to Haven.” He picked distractedly through a platter of cakes, offering one to Lan and two to the child before selecting one for himself. “It was a long way to travel. I’m sure it necessitated many stops.”

The woman said nothing.

“Deimos, what is the nearest human settlement between Haven and Mallowton?”

“A waystation called Ba’s Goods, my lord, if any permanent human habitation can be called a settlement. The nearest village would be Covington, some thirty miles further east.”

“And Iversex? Are you familiar with Iversex?” Azrael asked, turning to Lan.

She shook her head and forced herself to swallow a bite of cake. Lemon. Her favorite.

“No. I don’t suppose you would be. I did not present it for negotiation between us, as it lies beyond what I would consider convenient reach. Well beyond Mallowton, for example. Which raises a familiar point.” Azrael turned back to the woman. “Why, finding yourself safe in Iversex, did you abandon it and come here?”

Lan could have answered, if only she could speak. Even if the ferryman who had picked them up had kept Mallowton’s destruction and the reason for it a secret—damned unlikely—charity was something no village could afford. If she’d been alone, maybe she’d have a slim chance of convincing the mayor there to take her on trial. It was the custom to offer travelers a chance to farm or cook or work whatever skill they had in exchange for a bed and a bowl of scraps, but that was a courtesy and courtesy was thin enough these days. One woman might not be too much underfoot and might even be a help; a child was nothing but an open mouth. No, she would never be given more than a foreigner’s welcome—a camp bed to share with her little girl while her ferryman charged his batteries and did some trading, only to be moved on in the morning.

“Are you a stupid woman?” Azrael asked evenly, since Mary had not answered. “I confess I thought it must be an extraordinary mind that had eluded my captain here, but it would seem your escape had more to do with blind chance. I’m not certain yet whether to be relieved or disappointed that you are instead a stupid, nigh suicidal woman who has left not one or two but at least four settlements to come here. Directly to me. To throw yourself upon my mercy, a quality for which I’m certain I am not well-known.”

“I…I thought…”

“Yes?”

“It is said you sometimes take a…a mistress.”

Azrael leaned back in his throne and huffed out what was nearly a laugh. “I had no idea rumor of my predilections had spread so far. How embarrassing. Deimos, how far is Mallowton from Haven, at your best guess?”

“I would say somewhat less than three hundred miles.”

“And Norwood? How far is Norwood?”

“Two hundred miles, perhaps. Perhaps a little more.”

Azrael turned to Lan and cocked his head. “And are my amorous exploits the stuff of public house knowledge in Norwood, dear Lan?”

Even if she had permission to speak, she doubted she could have found her voice for that question. To speak the Devil’s name was to invite him in, everyone knew that. It wasn’t enough to stop the talk—as long as there were bored men and children who needed scaring, there would be talk—but it was safely confined to night-time tales of his legendary cruelty and whispered speculation on his origins. Not even at the bottom of the deepest cup in Norwood could a rumor be found concerning Azrael’s sexual appetites. Hell, she’d slept in that bed a hundred times over by now and still there was a part of her that could scarcely believe he had one.

Azrael’s gaze shifted back to cringing Mary and burned cold. “Mallowton’s ears are sharp indeed, to have heard what Norwood has not guessed, at half the distance. Tell me—” He leaned back and drummed his claws once on the arm of his throne. “—how well did you know the woman they sent to spy out Haven’s defenses?”

Lan started and stared at him.

The woman flinched. Whatever reaction she had expected (and her dull, desperate eyes suggested it wasn’t much), it hadn’t been that. “I had no part of that, my lord.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“I…I knew her, lord. But she came from the dolly-house on High Row and I worked the stockyards!” she went on quickly. “I never knew her better than to nod at!”

“You knew her well enough to hear her talk. And I’m sure it was entertaining to hear.” His mouth behind the mask twisted into a smile, made all the more terrible by the sincere humor it held. “What did she tell you of my nights in her bed? Did she describe the positions I favored? The sounds I made?” His head cocked. His smile widened and split to show a glint of fang. “Ah yes…I see she did. So you knew her, woman. You knew her very well. And even if you were not wholly in her confidence, you knew she was a part of the plan that Peter and Yancy and various other foreigners hatched together without your interference. And when the repercussions came due, you knew enough to gather your children and come to Haven, where you hoped to use what you knew to escape your measure of the consequence for your actions!”

“Lord, I swear—”

“Your inaction, then,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Either amounts to the same sin and, as with any sin, forgiveness is reserved for those who confess. So tell me, woman. Tell me all you knew of Mallowton’s insurrection and I may show you mercy. Tell me not, or tell me lies, and you will have none.”

The woman stared at him, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face, and finally, hoarsely, said, “I knew I had children, my lord. And I knew I had nowhere else to go. That was all I knew and all I let myself know. Forgive me.”

He did nothing. Nothing.

Lan steeled herself and touched his arm. He put his hand over hers absently and patted twice, but didn’t look at her. Maybe that was a good thing, she thought, but was not convinced. She wished he wasn’t wearing that damned mask. All she could see was his eyes and the cruel shadow of his mouth. He could be thinking anything.

“I am not convinced,” he said at last, even as he took a wedge of cheddar from the tray and passed it to the child. “However…I am disposed to be convinced. What have you to offer?”

“My lord?”

“Lan here—” His hand gripped hers, lifting it and bringing her unwillingly into focus. “—is not only a skilled conversationalist and a student of the architectural arts, but a master negotiator and advocate for this land. By her works, sixty-three settlements of Men are fed from my table. But of course, you know this.”

“I…” Mary’s eyes darted aimlessly about the room and finally dropped. “Yes, lord. I know.”

“Where then do your talents lie? You would seem to have a pragmatic nature,” he remarked, signaling for more wine. “And if your tale is true, you’ve demonstrated you are capable of logical thought and decisive action. You say you worked in the stockyards, but even there, one might develop skills of use to me here. I have some need of a doctor who understands biological imperatives as more than an intellectual exercise and it is a small step from tending animals to tending humans.”

Lan could tell the woman didn’t even know what all those words meant. She could only shake her head, her cheeks flushed and eyes downcast.

“No? Pity. What were you, then? A butcher?”

“No, my lord. I fed the cattle and cleaned the stalls.”

“But surely, you had leisure pursuits. That woman of our mutual acquaintance may have mentioned I am fond of music and I have found the talent of the living often far surpasses even the dedicated training of the dead. Do you play anything? Sing, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Paint? Stitch? I confess the artistic imagination both eludes and fascinates me. I am open to any interpretation. Have you any?”

“Mallowton is…was…no place for that sort of thing.”

“No, I suppose not. Do you read? No?”

“No, my lord.”

“However did you think to gain my favor?” Azrael inquired, offering the child a sip of wine and watching with a tolerant eye as she drained his cup.

“I thought…if my body pleased you…”

“A dangerous offering. My Lan is prone to jealousy. However…” Azrael gave Lan a narrow sidelong stare. “One cannot always bend to the whims of one’s concubine. Show me.”

The woman shifted on her feet, her eyes darting from Azrael to Lan and back again.

Azrael waited.

“M-my lord?”

“If your body pleases me, you said. How shall I know unless I see it?”

The woman threw Lan a haunting and hopeless glance, then shut her eyes and kept them shut. Her hands fumbled at the buttons of her shirt. Taking a deep breath to make her wasted breasts seem fuller, she rose and bared her chest to him.

It was awful. A filthy map of bone and bruises leading from nowhere to nowhere and leaving no footprints behind.

Azrael gazed without comment until dull color flooded the woman’s haggard face and she covered herself again. “I think not,” he said dryly. “What else have you to offer?”

The woman looked at her daughter and bent her head in the slightest of nods.

The child wiped her mouth on the back of her arm and matter-of-factly opened her shirt.

Azrael looked at her, his narrow twist of a smile finally and utterly gone, then at her mother.

The woman only waited.

Azrael shoved his throne back and stood up, seizing the startled girl by her wrist. “Steward!”

“Oh no! Please, no!” The woman stumbled forward and was pulled back and shoved to her knees by Deimos. She did not try to rise again, only held out her empty arms, crying, “Kill me, but don’t hurt her! She’s just a baby!”

“She’s old enough, it would seem,” Azrael spat and bellowed again for his steward.

The girl began to cry and then to struggle, twisting and scratching like a cat as she fought to return to her mother, but Azrael paid her no notice. He dragged her behind him as he descended the dais steps, moving fast down the hall to meet his uneasy steward. “Find a bed for this,” he ordered, passing the now-screaming girl over. “And someone to look after her. Captain!”

Deimos lifted his sword. “My lord?”

“Take her whoremongering mother to the nearest waystation. Another ferry should be along presently,” he snarled, turning his savage eyes back on the woman. “Pay for it on your own back!”

“Don’t take my baby!” The woman surged, letting her patched shirt tear in the Revenant’s grip so that she could catch at Azrael’s ankle. “She’s all I have! Please!”

“Would you have her returned then?” Azrael raised a hand to halt his steward’s retreat. “Or would you be paid for her?”

For a bad time, the only sounds to hear were the child screaming for her mother and the breaking of Lan’s heart.

Slowly, the woman put out her empty hand and held it, shaking, in the air.

Azrael snapped the clasp on his golden collar and threw it at her. It hit hard, leaving red marks on the woman’s cheek and arm, but she said nothing as she gathered all its pieces together, nothing as her daughter was pulled kicking and shrieking from the hall, nothing as Azrael swept away.

The audience was over. Lan supposed she was free now to speak, but honestly, she could think of nothing to say. The woman looked at her and, in spite of the pikemen and the servants and Deimos standing close with his sword in his hand, it was just the two of them.

“I had to do what’s best for her,” the woman said hoarsely. “Don’t…Don’t look at me like that. I had to. Better one man, even the Devil, than whore all her life. What else can she be now? We’ve got nothing. Nothing. He can give her everything I never can.” She tucked the golden plates of Azrael’s collar into her pockets, her sleeves, behind the threadbare backing of her belt. “I had to do it. I can’t carry her. It was either let him have her or take her with me and let her fall the next time we have to run. So don’t you look at me. I did what was best.” Her eyes welled; she blinked them dry. “She’s older than I was. And I turned out just fine.”

Lan got up, pulling the jeweled combs from her hair as she walked around the table and down the dais steps. She dropped them on the ground where the woman still knelt and kept going.

“I’m not sorry,” the woman said, not loud, but words had a way of echoing in this empty hall. “I’ve done nothing to be sorry for. She’s my only baby now. I have to sell her…or watch her die.”

* * *

Lan didn’t think she was more than a minute or two behind Azrael, but she never caught so much as a glimpse of him as she ran through the palace, only the whispering servants and nervous-looking guards he left in his wake. When she reached his bedchamber, one of the pikemen posted outside actually reached out to catch her arm.

“You’d be wise to let him cool, miss,” he murmured.

It was the first time he’d ever spoken to her, let alone touched her. Not without some trepidation, Lan opened the door.

At first glance, it didn’t look too bad. He had knocked a hole through one of the ornate panels screening his bath and thrown his masks around, breaking the breakable ones and denting the rest, but now he was just leaning on the mantel and staring into the fire. He did not turn his head and there was no reflective surface where he might have spied her, but at her first cautious step, he said, “Lan…go.”

He said it quietly enough, like the quiet thunder that sounds in the distance before the very worst of storms. She could feel it, that heaviness, that darkness, and it was not all her imagination. It was not merely his anger filling the air, but his power, and the longer she let it gather, the worse it was going to be when it finally raged.

She came the rest of the way inside, testing her footing and watching the wind. “How did you know it was me?”

He uttered a short, brittle laugh. “Who else would dare? Now get out. I owe you no audience and I am not in the mood for company.”

She didn’t move any closer, but she didn’t back away either.

He ignored her, scraping his claws on the mantel, but finally said, “Why are you here?”

“I’m not the brightest,” she admitted, risking another step toward him, but only the one. “I’m sure that’s a factor. A better question is, why are you here?”

He did not answer, but the air invisibly thickened, spiking out the fine hairs on her arms.

“Because I have to tell you,” she said, tasting batteries, “I am really surprised you’re not yelling the place up for Deimos so you can finish the job you started in Mallowton.”

“And how can you possibly condemn me for it now?” He brought his fist down suddenly, breaking off a large chunk of masonry, and swung on her, snarling, “I bought a child tonight, Lan. I have more fingers than she has years and her own mother gave her up to me! To me!” he bellowed, striking his chest a blow that would have shattered ribs on anyone else. His blood spattered, leaving a shape over his heart like a black sun. “It was not so long past that the living would not give their dead children to me, not for all the world, and now they give their living ones for gold! Why should I not purge the world that has such people in it?”

“Because you know there’s other people, too. Good ones.”

He spat a laugh at her. “Is that what you think? That there is still some faint light at the heart of me that believes the world is worth saving? Fuck the world! Fuck the God that set me in it! Had I the power Men tell of me, I would burn this Earth to a cinder in a heartbeat! I…I am not a rapist!” He hit the mantelpiece again, splitting the skin over his knuckles, and then raked at it, leaving scars in the stone as deep as any on his own body. “I have never taken a woman in violence and I would never touch a child! I am only so much a monster!”

Lan took a steadying breath and walked into the storm.

“Only so much,” he said hoarsely, watching the blood well and fall from his claws. “And no more.”

She took his arm and, after some small resistance, he let her have it. Lan turned his hand over in hers and had a look at the damage while he stared at the wall. His bones couldn’t break; she could see them, white and oddly beautiful within his dark and bloody wounds.

“Look what you’ve done to yourself,” she sighed.

He looked, expressionless, flexing his hand to make torn flesh tear further.

“Don’t do that. Come on.”

He didn’t move.

She threaded her arm through his and waited until finally, he dropped his hand and walked.

She led him to the bed and sat him down, resting a hand briefly on his shoulder and patting twice, unconsciously imitating her own mother’s idle comfort on those rare occasions when she gave it, then went to the bath and kicked through the ruins of his broken masks until she found a cloth and wet it. She picked up one of the bottles he kept beside the bath and took it with her back to him. She had no idea what was in it, but it was one of those he used on his other wounds, so she reckoned it was all right and if it wasn’t, he’d tell her.

He didn’t. What he said as she carefully cleaned around the edges of his torn knuckles was, “Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, but never took her eyes off the fiddly work her hands were doing. “All I know is, I hate to see you hurt. I kind of hate that that’s true even more, but there it is.”

“There it is.” His voice was stone as much as the splinters she picked out of his flesh. “And there is the only reason I have left not to reap the world.”

She opened her mouth to say some silly shit about life and the world and all the reasons better than her to want to preserve either one of them…

…and left it hanging open as a thought, dark and unwelcome as death itself, stole into her heart.

Azrael did not see it. The pale light of his eyes remained fixed on her hand, which had gone still. “You…want me,” he told her. “And I know why and I know it won’t last, but I don’t care.” He was quiet a moment, then said in a soft, intense rush, “You cannot know how many times I have had to pretend I believed that. Such is the curse of my memory that I am denied even self-delusion. I have known many woman who were willing, but you…you want me. And I…”

“You don’t want to lose me,” Lan heard herself say.

His expression changed, although it was impossible to say how, the way that shadows moving over a familiar shape can make something unchanging seem new. “I will not lay down my dead to keep you. Do not ask me. Not tonight.”

Lan shook her head, shook it hard, her hand fluttering up as if to push that all away like the insignificant thing it was in this moment. “You don’t want to lose me,” she said again, because that was what mattered, that was the seed of the thing planting itself so painfully in her heart. “Say it. I need to hear you say it if you mean it.”

His eyes flickered. Pulling his hand from her slack grip, he stood and just looked at her for a while.

And then he kissed her.

He didn’t speak, didn’t hold her, scarcely moved at all. He just kissed her. Even with his eyes as dim as they were, she could feel the heat of those unearthly fires, but she didn’t flinch away. He did, but he kept coming back, his scarred mouth brushing hers in little sips before finally pressing home. He breathed into her body and his breath was hot and bitter. His tongue flicked at hers, too timid to possibly be Azrael, whose tongue had explored every other part of her thoroughly, boldly.

He put his hands on her and she could feel the blood now, the blood she’d always known stained him, feel it hot and wet through her gown as he undressed her and still her body responded, because she did want him. She wanted this touch, even when it left a stain, like she wanted eyelight burning on her skin and the taste of him on her tongue. She wanted to feel the familiar ravages of his body every time she reached out her hand in the night. God help her, she wanted to lick every scar.

He lifted her like it was easy, lay her down like it was natural and right. He hid nothing from her—not the chill of his flesh or the points of his claws, not ten thousand years and more of memories, or even the ghost of the girl she knew was still standing somewhere in his mind with her shirt open and her small body ready to be bought. He gave her all he was and she embraced him gladly and brought him home.

It was too naked to be fucking, too desperate to be lovemaking. Sex was supposed to be something someone did to someone else, but whatever this was, they did it together. He hurt and she hurt with him. She was lost and he was with her in the dark. It was terrible and beautiful, shining with pleasure and clouded with pain, and that was how she came, torn open and full of light.

It held for a moment and then she was Lan again, falling back into her separate self and wearing the person she had been like clothes that had been tailored to someone else. Azrael lay atop her, cool and unpleasant, far too heavy to hold, and kissed her one more time.

“Did you hear me?” he whispered, there against her lips.

She could only stare up at him, her eyes open wide, feeling small and impossibly fragile, like the spiraling ice that sometimes formed on the eaves, needing only a single touch to shatter. There were no words, no capacity to form them, but there were thoughts swelling huge in her head and he was in every one of them, even deeper than he was in her body, because he didn’t want to lose her.

He didn’t want to lose her.

And maybe, that death-dark voice whispered to her aching heart, maybe he should.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lan did nothing to further the idea that had come to her in the night, but neither did she forget it. It had planted itself in her heart like a seed and, like a seed, even when she could not see it growing, day by day, it did. At last, it broke through the soil into something that could not be ignored, an idea no longer but a plan.

It wasn’t complicated. The rough idea was just the same as it had been the night it had made itself so unwelcomely known, but the individual elements still took some time to identify. Point, as he would say: Azrael alone could put an end to the Eaters. Point: Azrael alone had never been hurt by one or seen someone he cared for become one. Point: Azrael cared about Lan and not just with that possessive and largely absent-minded affection with which so many men came to care about their dollies. Just as she had become his lover, he had somehow become hers. So. Point: If Lan died, if she came back an Eater, Azrael would finally know what that meant. And he’d end them.

Really, the only trick was going to be dying without him finding out about it, so she had time to come back as an Eater. On the other hand, she couldn’t hide herself away too well, because she needed him to see her and, as he had already observed, even a closed door would confound an Eater forever.

The more she struggled with the problem of where, the more she became aware of the problem of how. Each potential location offered only so many suitable methods of suicide. His bedchamber provided the least risk of premature discovery, but even so, her options were limited to two: drown herself in the bath or twist a bedsheet or something into a crude noose and hang from a bed post, and both required that she sit down and do nothing as she died…and she just didn’t think she could do that.

There were other places better suited for hanging, but she would have to first find or craft a rope and then carry it through the palace undetected to reach her makeshift gallows. There were plenty of stairs she could throw herself down, but she’d be far more likely to break an arm or a leg than do herself any mortal injury. Better yet, she could go for a walk on the palace wall and jump off, which required only a moment’s courage, but some patrolling pikeman would almost certainly see her do it, assuming she didn’t actually land on one. That brought to mind landing pike-first, which in turn opened whole avenues of possible blood-lettings, all of which she considered in torturous detail before disregarding. Weapons were not left lying around in Haven. She would either have to find the armory—doubtless close to the garrison, with Deimos and his Revenants keeping tireless watch—or steal a knife out from under Azrael’s own eyes at the imperial table. And then, of course, she’d have to cut.

Poison, then. But she couldn’t even think the word without feeling her stomach knot and fists clench. Poison could be easily concealed, but it was seldom quick and never painless. Again and again, she saw herself steep some bitter tea and swallow, but even in her imaginings, she did not lie down and die. The cramps would come, turning her bowels to razors. She would vomit, spewing up precious poison, but by then, it would be too late to stop the events already set in motion. She would just keep vomiting until bile turned to blood. Her organs would fail; she would sweat her own piss. She would scream until her throat bled and even after she fell into the dying sleep, there would be convulsions, her body seizing and tightening until bones broke and joints popped free. Even then, it might be hours. Or days.

No poison. Anything but poison.

But if not, then what? When Serafina made up her bed, Lan contemplated smothering herself with a pillow. When she happened to pass by a window that overlooked the meditation garden, all she wondered was where they kept the stuff they used to douse the corpses to make them burn and if it was kept under watch. In her mind, she was strangled, crushed, boiled, disemboweled, burnt, bled, even eaten by pigs (in spite of the fact that Azrael’s pigs were far too fat and comfortable to bother themselves eating a person when there were troughs full of porridge and veg in easy reach). It occupied all her waking thoughts and perhaps her dreams as well, because Azrael woke her nearly every night to soothe away either tears or screams. It helped that she genuinely could not recall her nightmares once they were shattered, because he always asked and with such a narrow stare that she knew he was looking for the lie.

He may not have found one, but he knew something was wrong. He dealt with it in his usual way—seemingly ignoring it, but arranging for things he thought would please her. Her favorite foods had a way of appearing at nearly every meal, even more fancied up than usual. When she went to the tea house for lessons in what she still thought of as Tehya’s garden, she discovered a doe and her fawn drinking at the banks of the pond, which admittedly made a better present than one of Felicity’s secondhand shitbirds. He tried giving her the care of the girl, Heather, but that made for such a thoroughly uncomfortable span of days for both of them that eventually, he turned Heather over to Lan’s old etiquette tutor. Now and then, Lan would catch a glimpse of them in the halls—the girl sprinting away with her skirts up around her waist and the hated switch in her hand, whooping it up while the dead woman chased after her—and it would give her a smile, but not for long.

These diversions, as pleasant as they were, only made her other thoughts—Cut or hang? Jump or drown?—so much bleaker, so that she lost herself in them even deeper. One morning, after breakfast, she came back to Azrael’s chambers to change into her gardening clothes and got so caught up trying to determine the best place to jump to a certain death—not a broken leg or, worse, broken neck or back, but absolutely certain death—that she sat on his bed with one boot on and one in her hands until Serafina came to dress her for dinner. Another day, she stood staring out a window so long that when she finally came out of it and looked down, she realized a servant had been by and polished the entire hall, except for the perfectly round dull patch where she stood. She got so tired of saying she was fine that when a servant leaned in at dinner one night to ask if she wanted a fresh pot of coffee (since she’d been staring into her cup for some time, apparently), she snapped at him to quit badgering her, then spent the next several minutes hanging off Azrael’s arm, convincing him not to impale the poor bastard.

“What can I do, my Lan?” he asked her one night, as she lay sleeplessly beside him in his bed, going over and over and over where to get the rope, where to tie it, how to climb up to tie it in the first place and did she really want to hang at all? If she broke her neck, she wouldn’t be able to walk. If she didn’t break her neck, she’d have to strangle and that would take so long. “How can I make you happy?”

“I’m happy,” she said mechanically, staring into darkness.

“If that were true, I should hate to see you sorrowing, but it is a lie and we both know it.”

“Sometimes I’m happy.”

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes, I believe it. But not for many days now. You’ve been distant. Evasive.”

“Have I?”

He pointed at her. “Just so.”

“Maybe…” She groped for a plausible explanation and came up with, “I have a headache.”

The flames of his eyes leapt and turned as he rolled them. “Maybe? You don’t know?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“When I have a headache, I’m aware.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“So it would seem.”

She rolled over and looked at him, reaching up to trace his scars where the light from his eyes dimly revealed them. “I’m fine,” she told him. “I know I’m acting weird, but…I’ve just got to figure a few things out.”

“Can I do nothing?”

“End the Eaters,” she said with a humorless smile. “That would solve everything.”

He sat up with a hard sigh, but allowed her to pull him back down. He even put an arm around her so she could curl up against his side and pillow her head on his chest.

“You asked,” she reminded him, idly flicking at the silver rings along his side. “I don’t know why you keep expecting a different answer.”

“That’s amusing, coming from you.” He lay quiet while her hands explored the familiar territory of his broken flesh, neither guiding nor discouraging her, but only feeling. When she reached the place his heart ought to be, she stopped and left her hand resting there, as if she could feel it beating. There was something there, some unnatural machinery at work, sloshing and thumping beneath her hand, but it wasn’t a human heart. She didn’t like to touch it, but like a scab she just couldn’t help picking at, she always came back to it in the end. And when she finally fell still, he said, “Tell me the trouble, my Lan. Let me mend it.”

“There’s no trouble. There’s nothing to mend.”

“Please don’t lie to me.”

“Then please stop asking. You can’t fix everything with swans.”

It was a bitchy thing to say and she regretted it immediately, but Azrael merely chuckled and stroked her arm. “Would that I possessed penguins.”

She couldn’t take the feel of him anymore. She squirmed back, but took his hand and put it on her breast to let him know he was welcome there. “What about you? What can I do to make you happy?”

“I require nothing more,” he said, caressing. “Only this.”

“You give me all this stuff…lessons and dresses and fancy dinners…and all I do is sleep with you. It isn’t fair.”

“No, it is not. I give you a portion of my stolen wealth. You give me all you have.”

“You should use that line on your other dollies too,” she said, smiling. “It’s a good one.”

“I think so, but I fear it would only work on you.”

“I won’t be around forever.”

His hand’s motions stilled, but his eyes glowed out brighter for a long minute before dimming. “No,” he said quietly. “You won’t. Even you will beg to be released from me someday. Even you. But until then—” He bent to brush his lips across hers in his rough/gentle way. “—I will take all I can.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she said, which was a lie and of course he saw it at once. “I don’t want to leave,” she said next, which was the truth and only troubled him more.

“Ah Lan. You are already leaving me. Do you think I do not know what is happening? I have lost a hundred lovers.”

“A hundred, huh?” She smiled a little. “I’ve only ever had the one.”

To that, he seemed to have no answer.

“Let me ask you something. No strings. If it was just you and me and nothing else entered into it, would you end the Eaters then?”

His head tipped. “If it were only you and I and no one else…would you still ask?”

“Yeah. Because I don’t want to stay here. Not to be brutal about it, but most days, all I think about is how much I want to get the hell out of Haven.”

He frowned and looked away. “Norwood,” he muttered and his eyes flashed.

“No, not Norwood,” she said, irritably mimicking the tone he insisted he didn’t have when he said the name of her hometown. “In fact, fuck Norwood. Fuck Norwood and Haven both with the same stick. You know what? This is a lousy place to live and I don’t guess anyplace else is better, but I want to see it for myself. I want to see the ocean, for real and not in books. I want to see mountains and canyons and those rocks that balance on other rocks and trees you can drive through. The world’s not what it was, but it’s still a good place, maybe. ”

“Maybe.” He spoke the word oddly, as if it came with a taste he were trying to identify. Oleander, perhaps.

“But until the Eaters are gone, it’s their world. Even if you were with me—”

“Why would I be with you?”

“Who wants to see the world alone?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Then you can show me around,” she said, undaunted. “End the Eaters, Azrael, and we’ll get dressed and bunk off right now.”

“You tempt me,” he said, stone-faced. “No.”

They lay together, close but not touching. He’d left the fire on and the sound of it humming seemed too loud. So did his silence.

“If I ask you something, will you promise not to get upset?” Lan said at last.

“No.”

She slipped an arm across his chest and a leg over his hip, anchoring him. “Will you try not to?”

“Hm. I suppose I can make the effort.” His fingers brushed along her thigh. “Since you ask so persuasively.”

“Do you like what you’ve done to the world?”

His hand tightened, but he didn’t push her away. After a moment, his slow caresses continued. “I asked you once if you liked your life in Norwood, if you were happy within that world. I know, as I knew then, you were not and I know you hold me responsible. But the world existed before my ascension and Men have never been satisfied with their circumstances. I admit I make an attractive target—” He looked at her, his eyes throwing shadows across his scarred cheek. “—but I will not be blamed for all the injustices of life.”

“Okay.” Lan shrugged as best she could while lying on her side. “Now answer the question.”

“I never sought war. I never sought the ruin of this world.”

“Do you like what you have done?” Lan asked, enunciating each word. “Is this the world you want to live in the rest of your life? Are you happy?”

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?”

“I,” Wickham said cheerily, “am going to the tea house in the garden. You’re welcome to come with me, of course, but I won’t insist. My intermedi-mate needs a rest and she shall have it.”

Lan watched him tap papers and stack books, feeling she ought to protest, if only because she knew he didn’t really want a half-day. He was only offering because she was being so bloody useless. “Are you in a beastly mood?” she asked finally.

“Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

He stopped mucking with his teachery things at once and smiled at her. “Bunk off, Lan,” he told her gently. “Have a sleep or a walk or whatever you need to put yourself right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Her heart sank. “Goodbye, Master Wickham.”

He closed his briefcase and left, pausing once at the shelves to select a book to read while he was drinking his tea down in the garden.

When he was gone, Lan took a sheet of paper from the desk and uncapped her fountain pen. She was not connected to the hand that wrote. It was like she was at the cinema again, watching some woman she didn’t know blow on the ink to dry it and fold the paper into her sleeve with the knife. She sat there for some time longer, fighting the urge to write a second note, this one to Master Wickham, but she was afraid he’d find it before Azrael found his. In the end, she couldn’t leave it alone and so she found another sheet of paper and wrote I’m sorry I upset your routine. If he found it today, he’d think it was today she was apologizing for. If he found it tomorrow…hopefully, he’d still believe it.

Serafina was waiting for her in Azrael’s chamber, sitting on the edge of his bath and dipping her toes in the water with a bored expression that became alarm when Lan opened the door on her. She leapt up with a splash, her bare feet slipping on the tiles and her tongue slipping over apologies, but she quickly recovered herself when she saw who it was that had walked in on her. She tossed her braids, not quite with her usual haughtiness. “You’re early.”

“So are you.” Lan shut the door, careful to keep the sleeve with her knife and the note in it behind her back, hidden from her handmaiden’s sharp eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting on you, of course. Our lord wished to be informed as soon as you were made available.”

“Well, here I am. Trot yourself off and tell him.”

“I should make you presentable first.” Serafina ran a despairing eye over Lan’s attire and shook her head. “You don’t appreciate how much work that involves.”

“I’m not the only one. Azrael seems to think I’m at my most presentable when I’m bare-ass naked and honestly, he likes ‘preparing me’ himself. Look,” said Lan, edging toward the bed with her arm behind her back, “I’m not going to tell you not to bother, but I will say whatever you put on me is about to come off in shreds. How about we compromise? I’ll take a bath. Then you won’t need to dress me.”

“And your hair would be dry by dinnertime…” Serafina scowled thoughtfully. “All right. I’m trusting you to do a proper job of it and not just get wet and get out again.”

Lan waggled her fingers goodbye and watched her go, trying not to think of what condition she’d be in then, but imagining it all the same. Briefly, she wondered if the sight of her—crusted with blood, dull-eyed and slack-jawed, dead—would shock her otherwise taciturn handmaiden. Probably not. If she recoiled for any reason, it would be because she was afraid someone would hold her responsible.

And someone might. Someone who might flay her, impale her, and never let her die.

The urge came over her to call Serafina back, but what would she say? Any warning, no matter how oblique, would go straight to Azrael’s ear. No warning at all and she might as well be slitting Serafina’s throat along with her own.

Her own.

Lan waited for the tears in her heart to come spilling out her eyes, but they never did. And she didn’t have time to cry anyway.

She undressed, draping her old clothes over the bath screen where they would get wet but not bloody. Hopefully. She’d seen goats and pigs slaughtered; they tended to spray when the slaughterer didn’t know what he was doing. After some thought and without a lot of options, she slipped the knife and the note under the mattress. Then she stepped down into the bath, waded over to the other side, and turned on the fountain.

Water crashed down, just on this side of uncomfortably hot, uncomfortably loud. She closed her eyes and bent her head, telling herself it felt good drumming on her bare back even though it sort of hurt. She’d thought a bath might relax her. Nothing was going the way she’d planned. Hard not to see an omen in that.

She only meant to wash off yesterday’s sweat and wake up a little. Instead, she fell asleep, right there in the water with her head pillowed on her arms and ten thousand too-hot needles stinging unrestfully on her skin. She knew she was asleep, oddly. Even with her eyes closed, she could see, and even odder, she could see herself.

If it was a dream, it wasn’t very interesting…just a naked lady in a bath. But as she watched, things began to change. The fire dimmed so that the darkness slowly folded in around her, swallowing the bed, the screen, the wardrobe, everything but Lan herself and the last of Azrael’s masks—the gold demon with horns. The sockets were aimed at her, as if it was watching as the black enveloped her, and when the shadows closed all the way around her bath, the water turned to blood.

‘That’s interesting,’ thought Lan, disturbed, watching herself sleep peacefully on as blood clotted in her hair and poured thickly down her back. The darkness and the deep red color made her skin look even whiter…or maybe she was getting paler. She was. And all at once, Lan understood that it was her blood in the water, her life falling out. She could see death washing over her, decay creeping in. Her skin shrank on her bones, losing its luster, sagging as the flesh beneath withered. Her blood-damp hair dulled and began to fall out. Behind her in the bath, the red water bulged and grew upward, taking on Azrael’s form, crowned with the same gold mask that had somehow vanished from the shelf without her noticing. He reached for her, his claws carving gashes in her slack flesh as he caressed her, but there was no pain. He said her name. Her eyes, shriveled in their sockets, opened at the sound, tearing her out from this eerie dreaming distance and anchoring her at once in her dead flesh.

Lan jerked awake with a scream and a splash, smacking her hand on the lip of the bath as she reached for a knife she hadn’t worn in a year, then swung around and screamed again, throwing herself backwards with enough force to knock her own feet out from under her.

Azrael caught her, laughing, and held her until she steadied. “Forgive me. I thought it odd you didn’t answer, but I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

“I was dead.” She looked down, clutching at her chest where her heart still pounded, only slightly reassured by the sight of her undecayed flesh, shining with water, just water. “I was dead.”

“Hush, now. Are you sleeping still? What is this dreaming talk?”

“I was…I…I’m bleeding,” she said numbly.

He took her wrist and held it up so he could see her scraped knuckles for himself. Spray from the fountain thinned the blood welling up from the very shallow abrasions, creating scarlet ribbons twining down her arm.

“It isn’t serious,” he told her. Like she needed to be told at all, much less by a man with open wounds and exposed bones.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring fixedly as blood beaded up and washed itself away.

“Mm.” He held her arm beneath the fountain’s fall, nuzzling as he did so at her neck, brushing his rough lips across the thin skin beneath her ear. “I forgive you.”

She pulled her hand out of the fountain long enough to see it was still bleeding and shoved it back under the fall.

He straightened and in his considering silence, she could almost hear his frown. “Shall I send for a doctor?” he asked at last, his tone one of neutral concern.

“No, I…I’m fine,” she said and turned toward him to put her arms around his neck where she didn’t have to see the blood. It shouldn’t bother her—it never had before—but nothing felt normal now. She smiled at him; even her smile felt like crying.

He was not drawn in. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing.”

His jaw clenched. He made an effort to gentle his expression, but his true feelings were clear; he hated it when she lied to him.

His mood was turning aside after all and this was not what his last memory of her should be. In some desperation, Lan surged up on her tiptoes and kissed him. He let her…but he did not kiss her back.

“Did you come here to talk?” she asked, stroking the back of his neck just above the jut of bone. His newest flesh was sensitive to touch, she’d learned; his body felt pleasure best where it had suffered the most pain. “I didn’t.”

One corner of his mouth twisted in a smile. “You place me in a difficult position.”

“Yeah?” She pushed him back and he let himself be pushed, until he reached the stairs and sat at her direction on the middle one. There she pressed close, licking drops of bathwater away from whatever skin presented itself as she made her way down his body. “What position is that?”

“I can either allow you to have your way…where I freely admit my preference leans. Flesh, as I once told you, has its own priorities.”

“Mm-hmm.” Her tongue traced the firm hills and valleys of his abdomen.

“Or I can pursue the truth, where I suspect my best interests lie.”

“Better than this?” She trapped his stiffening cock between her breasts and rubbed herself along its length.

“An unfair comparison. What are you trying to do, Lan?” he asked softly, seriously.

“Get your end away without drowning,” she replied, stubbornly smiling. “It’s harder than it looks. Hang on.” She took a deep breath and submerged herself fully, sucking in a mouthful of water and directing it in little jets all along the underside of his shaft before coming up for air. She stroked him in her fist as she looked up through damp tangles of her hair to see his unsmiling face gazing down at her. “I’ve never done it in the water before. Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” She dunked under to hide from him again, taking him into her mouth, but could only manage two or three shallow passes before she had to come up again. “That’s too bad. I kind of liked the idea of you doing something with me for the first time.”

His hand, which had been idly combing through her hair, suddenly stopped, then gripped her chin and forced her to meet his narrowed eyes. “What?”

Startled, Lan repeated herself.

“That isn’t what you said. You said, ‘for the last time.’”

Heat flamed in her cheeks. Had she? She must have. His memory was infallible. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she told him. “Sorry.”

He did not look convinced. When Lan reached for him again, he caught her wrist.

He was going to be like that.

Stifling a sigh, Lan used his grip to help her climb his body, doing her best to be sexy and slippery instead of guilty and exhausted. She must have had some success at it too, because she could see his eyes flickering with every awkward, slithery movement. When she finally came even with him, face to face, his doubts, although not wholly displaced, were comfortably swallowed by desire.

“You trouble me,” he said gravely.

“Sorry to hear that.” She went to work nibbling on his jaw, flicking her tongue lightly at the extremely unpleasant edge of his open scars as she followed it down to his collarbone.

“No, you’re not.”

“Okay, I’m not.” She kissed the hollow of his throat, lapping at the water that had collected there and tasting mainly soap.

“I’ve never seen you like this before. I don’t like it.”

“You’ve seen me like this plenty,” she said and boldly took hold of his firm cock. “And you love it.”

He searched her eyes, frowning. “Please talk to me.”

She kissed him, forcing their mouths together although he did not resist, bruising her lips with the violence of her conquest.

He put his hand on her chest and gently, insistently, pushed her away.

They stared at each other. The fire hummed. The water laughed. He waited.

“Don’t you want me?” she asked finally. Her voice cracked, damn it. She was not going to cry!

“You know I do.”

She moved to straddle him. He pushed her back.

“What do you want, Lan? Will you not simply tell me? Would I not give you anything you desired?”

“Almost.”

He shook his head, his jaw tightening, but he didn’t push her away. He brought her closer, wiping droplets of water from her cheek, her lips, her chin. “Can you not be a little happy with your heart’s penultimate desire? Must it be the world? Come, I will give you whatsoever else you wish if you will only name it.”

She put her arms around him and pressed her brow to his, pressed hard. “I want you to miss me when I’m gone. Not for a thousand years or a million, but all of them, until there’s no more way to count them. I want to give you the best night of your life and I want you to remember it forever.”

“Do you mean that as a blessing or a curse?”

She was too tired to think before she answered. She told the truth: “A bit of both, I reckon.”

He nodded, puffing out a breath that could have been a laugh with a little more effort. “Done. I think I can safely swear that you have been, remain, and forevermore shall be the sweetest thorn that ever stabbed me. What else shall you have of me?”

“You know what I want.”

“And you have known from the first you will never have it, but this melancholy is new. Come, Lan.” He brushed his fingertips across her cheek. “I see the shine of tears hiding behind your eyes even now. What wound is this? Tell me. Let me mend it.”

“I…” Her voice failed. She hugged on him, hiding from him in his arms, but he only waited and at last, she whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

He stroked her hair, combing out damp tangles with his claws in several long, slow passes before he finally said, “Then you won’t.”

“Don’t. That’s not what I…” She tried to move away, but he would not release her and she was forced to press herself even closer to avoid his searching gaze. “I’m tired. It’s making me stupid.”

“You’re tired,” he agreed, still stroking her hair. “It’s making you honest. Lan, I do not say I will raise you up tonight. I would not, even if you asked me. I will have you and cherish you all the years of your life, but you have my word on it. I will never let you die.”

“But you can’t make me live.”

“Lan,” he said, more a growl than a sigh.

“It’s not the same and you know it! That’s why you wouldn’t trade for it, even when I said I was willing. That’s why you won’t do it tonight, even if I ask! Because you know better than anyone, you can make me love you, but you’d always know it wasn’t—”

He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her hard against his mouth, silencing her with his kiss. Her pliancy, her silence, only seemed to provoke him to greater ferocity. He took what she willingly gave, dominated what she freely surrendered. One hand dropped to squeeze with bruising force at her thigh, yanking her leg around his waist. In answer, she lifted the other and laced them behind him, rolling her hips lightly against the chill hardness of his erection.

He refused to be placated. Snarling into her mouth, he lifted her, jostled her into position, and drove himself home in one powerful motion. She lost her grip on him immediately, but didn’t fall; in the water, she was nearly weightless. One hand at her hip was enough to support her even through the fury of his thrusts. The other stayed knotted in her hair, forcing her to meet his hungry mouth. Waves broke over the tiles as he made her ride him harder and faster, washing out as far as the stuttering fire, splashing up between them with every wet slap of their bodies.

He had always been passionate, but never violent. It should have frightened her, but she could feel nothing but a heartsick throb of sorrow and the purely physical rush of her body’s responses. Nothing was going the way she’d planned, but events were set in motion and she couldn’t stop them now.

He broke his brutal kiss to watch her cum, his eyes blindingly bright, hot with triumph. His own climax seemed almost an afterthought, a careless shrug at the end of a particularly effective argument. He set her on her feet, sharp teeth bared in a savage smile, and said, “It wasn’t real.”

She blinked, disoriented, trapped between her body’s heightened sensation and the dark storm of her thoughts. “What?”

“That is what you were about to tell me, is it not? I can make you love me, but I would always know it wasn’t real. And why? Because you arrogantly assume that life and love are one and indivisible. The soul must die, you think, and flesh cools and whatever happens after that must be of my own devising.” He advanced on her, pushing her back along the side of the bath with the intensity of his stare alone until she bumped the corner. His hand darted out, seizing her sex; his thumb teased at her clit; his fingers parted her, pierced her. He smiled, feeling the immediate, hungry grip of her body.

“This is the nature of flesh,” he told her, almost purring. “It does not rationalize its desires. It asks no permission, considers no consequence. It only feels, be it warm or cool.” He lifted her up on his hand, fingers pumping harder, bringing her still-humming nerves to a second explosive peak almost instantly. He set her down again, not as gently as before, causing mini-waves to ripple outward and come sloshing back even bigger than before. “This is flesh,” he said again. “And if flesh can teach you nothing else, child, it will teach you that life is not love.”

“Neither is sex.”

His smug smile faded.

“I may not be as old as you, but even I know that much. And I know that sex, when it’s just about bodies and not people, isn’t that great. And you know it too.”

“Do I.”

“I can prove it.”

He uttered a humorless challenge of a laugh and rolled one hand through the air before folding his arms over his naked chest.

“If you could pick my next words, what would they be? Fuck me? Or I love you?”

His lips thinned in a smile. “Fuck me,” he said. “And I would choose them again and again, were not the limits of your mortal flesh a factor.”

She merely nodded, unsurprised and a little impatient. “And if you couldn’t pick them, what would you want them to be?”

His smile faded, then grew back cold. “Is this your latest offer, diplomat? You offer to say these things if only I would take back my hungering dead?”

“You’re not getting it. This has nothing to do with what I’d actually say or even what I want to say. It’s about what you want to hear and why.”

“And you think I want to hear these hollow oaths so desperately that I would give over all my victory? You think I find your honeyed lies so much more precious than your honest flesh?” He thrust his face at her, his eyes blazing and fangs exposed. “I don’t need your words and I’ve had your body. I will not lay down my hungering dead for a promise of either.”

Lan sighed and waded past him, out of the bath. Each shallow step took more and more effort to climb, as if her failure were waiting for her at the top with a weight all its own.

“You’ve no right to be angry,” he said at her back.

“I’m not. Just disappointed.”

“That I would not be trapped?”

“That you think that’s what I was doing.”

She heard a soft slap and rasp behind her—the unmistakable sound of Azrael rubbing at his scars. For a moment, she thought he might call her back, but in the end, he simply got out of the water.

“We’ll speak later,” he said curtly, picking his wet clothes off the floor and dressing in them. “After you’ve slept.”

She tried one last time. “There won’t always be a later.”

“Yes!” he snapped. “Always! There will not always be mercy, there will not always be compromise, but there will always be time and I can give it to whomever I please, whether they desire to receive it or not! So go to bed, Lan, and we will talk later!”

He left, slamming the door behind him hard enough to make the bed curtains flutter.

Lan took the coverlet off the foot of the bed and wrapped herself in it. She sat down, watching the firelight shine over the many little lakes left on the floor.

After a while, she reached under the mattress and brought out her hidden treasures. She smoothed the paper out over her thigh and read the words that stranger in the library had written like she’d never seen them before: You will never understand until you lose someone you love. She put it on the bed beside her and picked up the knife.

She held it.

Eventually, she looked at it. The handle was decorated with a pattern of roses and vines. The blade was fat and rounded, too short for the length of the hilt. Pretty, but not very functional.

Hesitantly, she drew the blade along the inside of her arm. It dimpled the skin, nothing more.

She sat.

After an endless, unmeasureable span of time, she gripped the handle tightly, took a deep breath and pulled the blade across her arm in a quick jerk. Strangely, she saw the blood before she felt the pain. It poured out of her so much faster than she expected. Alarmed, she dropped the knife and clapped a corner of the coverlet over the wound, only now feeling the pain. When she lifted the coverlet a minute later, she could see the pale lips of the wet wound gape for an instant before fresh blood spilled out. Her stomach flipped over queasily and clenched into a cold knot.

Pushing the coverlet back (but not taking it off; she could do this, but only if she didn’t have to see), she picked up the knife and made another little cut. She decided it didn’t really hurt that much. Like a bee-sting, it was more the throbbing heat that followed than the actual injury. She made a neat ladder of cuts, trying to make each a little deeper than the one before, then covered the whole thing over with the blanket and watched the grey fabric turn black.

It was too late to pretend she could just stop now. She couldn’t hide what she had done and besides, her note was already written. Time to stop mucking around and just do it.

She wished Azrael kept a bottle or two in the bedroom. Maybe this would be easier if she was tight.

“Live and learn,” she muttered, then realized what she’d said. She laughed a little. Cried a lot. Then picked up the knife and placed the blade against the side of her throat.

‘You might save the world with one good blow,’ she thought. His words. His voice in her mind. And maybe it was even true. In that moment, it was almost as if she leaned back out of her body and watched, as of a film projected into the room. She could see herself, an Eater (she looked a lot like her mother), raised up and shambling in hungry discontent back and forth across the floor (so much like her mother), with old blood staining her body and her hair still damp from the bath. She could see Azrael open the door, see his eyes go wide and bright, see his mouth behind the mask gape in a silent howl of grief…or maybe he wouldn’t. The film skipped and ran itself back and now he was opening the door again. He waved his hand, just as he had done for his Children that night in the dining hall, and the Eater she had become dropped like meat to the ground to be cleared away by his attentive chamberlain. He might mourn her and certainly he would remember her, but there would always be another dolly come along to comfort him.

And she would never know. That was the hell of the thing. One way or another, she’d be just as dead and whatever happened after that was just going to have to happen without her.

Lan closed her eyes.

She held her breath.

‘For the world,’ she thought, but did not cut. Could not.

She did not want to die.

Without warning, the door banged open.

Lan’s hand jerked, laying a line across her throat like a red-hot wire. Heat poured out. Not heat, but blood. So much blood. It soaked into the coverlet, saturated it, splattered her thighs, poured onto the floor. She jumped up without thinking and the letter she had worked so hard to write flipped over, drifted down, and landed right in the spreading pool of it. Red roses bloomed through white paper.

Lan raised her eyes from that with effort to watch Azrael stride across the room—Azrael, who was not supposed to be here yet. Was he here? Did any of that just happen? The world had taken on a dreamlike quality in which colors ran and sounds faded. She could see Azrael’s mouth moving, but she couldn’t make it out beyond his angry tone and a few disjointed words: “…am not…only…no argument…for this…”

Lan reached up to grip her throat and felt blood, felt it, like a living thing crawling out of her. “Azrael,” she said. Even her voice sounded as if it came from somewhere else, someone else.

He did not look at her, but went straight to his golden mask, forgotten on its shelf. He was still talking to her, but all his words hummed together, indistinguishable. He was angry. She’d made him angry. Their last night together and this was what she’d done with it. She was so sorry. She tried to say so, but wasn’t sure what came out. Whatever it was, Azrael did not answer. He just picked his mask up, turned around, and dropped it.

The sound of the mask hitting the tiles was not what she expected. Resonant. Like a gong. Gold was supposed to be heavy. Shouldn’t it have cracked the floor? ‘It isn’t real gold, is it?’ Lan tried to say, oddly offended. What she said, slurring so that even she could barely understand the words, was, “It isn’t real.”

Then she collapsed, slowly, in stages, like a scaffold folding up. First, her butt hit the edge of the bed. Then her knees hit the floor. Then she was sliding back along the fall of the blankets and Azrael was running at her, bellowing her name from a thousand miles away, but even as he pulled her up, she seemed to drop through his hands, through the floor, through everything. The world receded, leaving her, taking him. The lights of his eyes were the last to go out and then Lan was alone in the dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Death was not what she thought it would be. It hurt. She’d expected that to some extent, but she thought she’d be unconscious for most of it, that she would do her actual dying in her sleep.

There was no sleep in the choking black in which she had trapped herself. She could not move or speak, only lie without any sense of up or down or where her limbs were. She felt oddly weightless, as if she’d be floating if only the pain weren’t weighing her down…or perhaps it was the pain that buoyed her up.

She could not open her eyes, but sometimes her eyes were opened. On these occasions, there were faces, mostly strangers with huge hands that alternately held her down or moved her around, but she didn’t know how much she could trust what she saw because the one time she did see someone she knew, it was one of the tailors and that made no sense at all. Beyond these hands and faces, she knew nothing other than she was in Azrael’s bed and that bothered her, because she’d left it simply swimming in blood. She guessed she’d be beyond caring once she actually died, but it was taking a lot longer than she’d thought and in the meantime, it bothered her.

Aside from the pain and the faces, there were also voices, jolting her out of the black-that-was-not-sleep without sense or reason. Everything she heard seemed distorted and difficult to grasp and even those few times that they did twist into recognizable words, she couldn’t seem to hold onto them long enough to squeeze any real meaning from them. There seemed to be two of them, but just when one stopped and the other started was impossible to know. They faded in and out for a long time as Lan floated in death, and it was almost comforting until something brittle loudly smashed apart and that was how she knew Azrael was there, even before he shouted: “This is a simple procedure! I have seen it done in the damned streets, in open combat, with no more than bombs for light! How can you be so incompetent?”

“It was simple,” a voice said. “And with the right equipment and training, it would be now, but the reality of our situation has changed.”

Something else smashed, the sound exploding right in Lan’s head. She could not open her eyes, but she moaned and at that, all the voices silenced.

“She’s waking,” Azrael said.

“Forgive me, my lord, but she’s not sleeping. She’s suffering. And…it might be best to let that suffering end.”

‘I’m okay,’ Lan tried to say, but the words sounded only in her mind. Her lips made only another moan, weaker than the first. And she wasn’t okay, was she? Maybe she would be, once she was dead and the hard part was over, but right now, she was about as far from okay as a girl could be. She was heavy and brittle, a clay shell full of pain, and she was cold…so cold.

A hand. His hand. It came out of the dark to stroke her cheek just once, then went away like it had never been.

“Give her something,” said Azrael. “For her pain.”

“My lord—”

“I command it.”

“My lord, I don’t dare. Not unless and until she has blood.”

“Then give it to her.”

“It’s not that simple,” the voice said, in the over-polite way of a man repeating himself. “Blood has specific groups and they are not all compatible.”

“Cross-matching would be impossible under these conditions,” a second voice interrupted. “The tools for testing are antiquated and no care has been taken to preserve them.”

“Excuses! Transfusions have been done for hundreds of years before the tools you speak of even existed!”

“And patients died from them,” the first voice said quietly.

“With respect, my lord, do you even understand what you are asking me to do? First, I either re-invent a cross-matching test or I ‘have a guess’ at a donor, and then I either re-invent a centrifuge to create the necessary products or use whole blood, which all but guarantees complications I would then be forced to treat using decades-old equipment and expired pharmaceuticals! I can’t be made responsible for the outcome of that…that mess! You raised me to look after the medical needs of your warmbloods and I have done my service faithfully, but this is not a touch of summer flu or a sprained ankle. I can’t treat this from a book. This woman needs a real doctor!”

“Find one.”

“There are none.”

“I say, find one!”

“My lord, it’s been thirty years. You must at least acknowledge the possibility that they are all dead. Even if there were a surviving surgeon somewhere close at hand, how eager would one be to treat your…” An awkward pause. “And even if we had one, the scarring alone is more than can be mended and we haven’t even seen the infection that is sure to follow. Even if she has the best possible care, she’ll be horribly disfigured! With the utmost respect, lord, the only sensible course of action is to let her die. You can always bring her b—”

The last word became the eggshell crack of bone breaking and the rustling thump of a body falling to the floor. After a short silence, the first voice said, “We’ve stopped the bleeding…for now…but she will not survive without a transfusion. Which I will attempt if you insist, lord, but you must understand that if she receives the wrong type of blood, it will kill her even faster than the lack.”

“So you’ve said.”

“So it is, lord. Her body may already be failing and I would not know it. Reading about hemolysis does not qualify me to treat it. Listen. Hear me. I will do as you command, but a transfusion carries with it enormous risks. I have no way to test for type, much less blood-borne diseases or parasites. And then there is the issue of contaminated equipment. At the very least, I will need needles and tubing, and after all this time, there may not be any left to salvage. Whatever I do find cannot possibly be considered sterile and—”

“Enough, I say!” Azrael’s fist struck some immoveable object—the wall, perhaps—and he began to pace. The sound of his footsteps circling made the room itself seem to tip and the blackness swim around her. “I will hear no more of this. I command you to do whatever is necessary to save her.”

“As I said, I will try,” said the voice in a neutral tone that left no doubt as to his belief Lan was well beyond saving. “To begin with, I need your Revenants to take me to the nearest human settlement that might have a clinic, because he was right…she needs a real doctor and the living will not willingly give one up. He or she may have the equipment I need, but if not, we’ll have to search for it and that will take time. While we’re gone, I need every living human in Haven brought here so a match can be made as soon as possible on our return.”

“And for her? What can be done for her?”

Another pause. “Nothing,” said the voice, with just a hint of a question in his tone, as if he were also asking why he had to say it. “Her condition is extremely critical and there is no way to stabilize it. Plasma…oxygen…medication…all of the things that would improve her chances even a little are gone. Her heart could stop at any moment. I am frankly astonished it hasn’t already.”

The silence that followed was so long that Lan thought she’d died again, and when he did speak, the words were so strained, she couldn’t be sure it was really Azrael who spoke them: “Can I do nothing?”

“Someone should watch her. To prevent her coming back in an…unfortunate manner.”

“Yes. That would indeed be unfortunate.” His fingers combed through her hair. “But no more so than to deny her final wish, surely.”

“My lord?”

“You have your orders. Go. My full authority is at your disposal. And you,” he murmured. “Oh, my Lan…damn you.” And suddenly, he was close, his lips against her ear and his hand heavy on her bare chest, pinning her to life and the world like Mayor Fairchild used to pin butterflies to a board. “Damn you! Hear me now and hear me well. If you die, I will raze your Norwood. I will raze all of them—every village, every waystation, every wall. I will make the whole of this world your grave! Do you hear me? How could you do this to me? How could you dare? Answer me!”

She couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Her heart stumbled on, shuddering in the chill of his touch while all the rest of her flesh lay numb. She knew she should feel panic now, she should be afraid, but exhaustion numbed out all emotion. She was slipping even as he held her, sinking deeper into the cold because it was the only place that promised relief from the pain. She knew it was death and she didn’t want to die, but even that was a vague shadow in a far greater blackness.

“Answer me,” he said again, but the words were broken now, broken and bleeding. “How could you? How could you speak to me of love, knowing all the while what you meant to do? Was this your plan all along? This…this hateful, cowardly, monstrous act?”

The naked pain in his voice cut at her from every side. She twisted away, but there was nowhere to go but deeper inside herself, into the cold place.

The hand over her heart went away. Another cupped her cheek.

“I’ll end the Eaters,” he whispered. “I’ll end them for you, Lan, if only you ask me one more time.”

That should mean something, she knew, but it didn’t. The cold had a voice, too. It told her nothing else mattered. It told her she was safe inside it. It told her nothing had to hurt.

“Say something,” said Azrael, but his voice was strange, warped like a reflection in one of the mirrors you could sometimes still find in the old houses.

On her walk to Ashcroft, she’d slept one night in a house like that, and even though it had been stripped to the walls in most rooms, she’d found a bit of mirror glass in one of them. Remembering that, it seemed suddenly that she was there. She could smell moldering plaster and feel the chill of the glass as she pinched the shard carefully between her fingers and tried to squint past the age and neglect to see her face. Then Elvie Peters was there beside her, only not the Elvie Lan had left, but Elvie at eight or nine—all whispers and giggles and ribbons in her hair, back when they were friends and too young to know yet how impossible that was—telling her she could see her truelove’s face in it if she looked in it right, so Lan turned the glass, hoping to see Eithon Fairchild, but instead she saw a black wolf, jaws gaping and eyes like fire. “Say something,” it snarled.

A pinpoint of cold struck her cheek, so much colder than the enclosing death, so cold it was indistinguishable from heat, shattering this odd living dream and plunging her back into her body and the pain that housed it. She gasped—her breath was a stone in her lungs, a knife in her throat—and maybe she opened her eyes because a wash of white overtook the black for just a moment, but it didn’t last. Somewhere, Azrael was still talking, his words fading out to a meaningless, yet soothing, hum. Lan listened as the cold crept in, wrapping her in its numbing embrace until it had covered her over entirely and she slept.

* * *

She woke moaning, pulled from the increasingly comfortable cold by someone shoving a thin board between her and Azrael’s bed. Once she had been slabbed, her ankles were caught and lashed together with a belt, binding her to the board. Then her knees. Then a belt was cinched tight across her hips. All this, and yet Lan somehow still didn’t know it was coming or what it meant when her wrist was seized and forced into a restraint. It put tremendous pressure in her arm, one even greater than the pain-pulse already beating in her neck, head and heart. She tried to pull free, but couldn’t, tried to at least turn her head to see who had her and couldn’t do that either. With all her strength, she managed to raise her other arm, groping blindly into space, but felt that wrist seized as well.

“Lie still,” a new voice said. A woman’s voice, rough as a cat’s tongue, loveless. “The harder you make this for me, the harder I make it for you.”

Although she still knew she was in Haven and why she had come, hearing that voice, Lan somehow forgot her mother was dead, because who else could that be? She relaxed unhappily, allowing her mother to finish setting the restraints on her, although she could not help crying out again when those calloused hands moved to her trapped arm and made the hellish squeeze there even tighter.

“You’re hurting her.” And that was Azrael, although he wasn’t close. At the mantel, perhaps, keeping his back to the room as he gazed into the fire. “Be gentle.”

“You brought me here to save her life,” the woman said, unbothered. “That doesn’t come gentle. She has to be snug for the move, doesn’t she?”

“I’m not convinced of the necessity.”

“Pity, that, because I am. Look, I’m not going to tell you there’s no harm in it, but the fact is, the equipment we need is a damn sight more delicate than she is, even in her current condition. You’ve had your lads scrub down a space there, so it’s nice and sterile, which is more than can be said about this place, sparkly-clean as it is. Those bed curtains are naught but breeding pens for bacteria and you’ve done such a good job making the air here all toasty warm and wet that it can’t help but grow. One infection, your lordship, just one, and she’s off. Convinced yet?”

No answer, but he must have done something—a nod or a wave, because the hands returned to make a final hellish adjustment, and then she was swooped off the bed and onto a high, narrow table with wheels.

“There we are, all set,” said the woman. “As soon as your chappie finds me transport, we’ll be off. Your deadhead doctor has already started the cross-matching, so with any luck, we’ll be able to top her off as soon as we get there. In the meantime, suppose I’d best have a look at this.” The weight lying across Lan’s throbbing neck lifted, allowing cool air to rake across the hot hurt that lived there. A low whistle rolled out. “Quite a mess you’ve made of yourself, girl.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

Azrael’s heavy footsteps brought him to her in an instant. His hands gripped the sides of her face, his thumbs prying at her eyes, trying to open them. “Lan…Lan, do you hear me?”

“Here, here! Begging your lordship and all that, but shift it!”

“Mom…please,” Lan said weakly. “Don’t…”

“She’s hallucinating. Do something!”

“I’ll do you a boot up the arse if you don’t budge over! Out of my way or out of the room!”

That couldn’t be her mother. Her mother never said ‘arse’ in all the years of Lan’s life. Even if she had come to this country as a child, she remained, as Azrael would say, very American in her habits.

Now she remembered: her mother, barefoot and burned. Tears flooded Lan’s closed eyes. She felt them seeping out, although she was too tired to really cry. The grief…it sat in her stomach, huge and heavy, an entirely separate entity from herself, even from the pain or the cold. No wonder she couldn’t speak or move; she was made up of all these different pieces, disconnected. And maybe this was what death really was—not the stillness, but the shattering.

“We need to come to an understanding,” the woman who was not her mother was saying while Lan lay broken beneath her. “If you want her to die, by all means, keep getting in my way. But if you want me to do my job, then you have got to push off and let me do it.”

“I forgive your insolence,” Azrael murmured, still cupping Lan’s face between his hands. “Specialists of any field are apt to be ill-mannered, particularly when confident of their own talents. And, as I have need of yours, I am in no position to protest inconsequentialities. Quite the contrary. So. I will leave you to your work. Should you prove yourself deserving of your arrogance, you shall have whatever reward you name. Should you not—” He took his hands away. Lan could almost see him, alone in the blackness behind her eyes, turning the full force of his stare down upon the unfortunate woman who had made herself the sole focus of his attention. “—be certain, I will remember your tone and be repaid of every offense.”

“I’m sure I meant no offense,” said the woman, now very subdued.

“I’m sure you mean exactly what you say, which is the only reason I’m willing to forgive it. Captain.”

Deimos, whose presence had been unguessed at all this time, answered from the foot of Lan’s bed, close enough that she should have heard him breathing, if only the dead bastard breathed. She supposed he had been posted there to keep an eye on the doctor. Or to stand ready to act if Lan died. Couldn’t have Eaters running through the palace, leaving bits all over and smelling the place up with rot.

“See to it the doctor has whatsoever she requires. I wish to be informed at once should her condition change…to any degree.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Azrael bent over the bed. She felt him before she heard him, although he never touched her. She had often thought his moods had substance; here was the proof. She could feel, not his inhuman cold or the stirring of his breath, but an ominous weight in the air itself, staining the blackness of her inner mind even darker. “Rest now,” he growled, his mouth against her ear. “Rest while you can. Do not trouble yourself yet to think of all the ways I might repay your offense.”

Before she could answer (and she would have. She just needed more time to work up the strength and focus necessary to form words), he kissed her. His scar-roughened lips pressed down firmly over hers, parting them to breathe into her. It was like swallowing a live coal, so much hotter than she remembered his kisses to be. Reflexively, she gasped, pulling that heat all the way into her lungs, where it bloomed huge and slowly, slowly cooled.

When he pulled away at last, she managed to tip back her head, seeking blindly after him like a flower following the sun, but he left her and she fell back into her pillow, dizzied by the effort.

“Right,” said the not-mother, emboldened now that Azrael was gone to her previous edged tone. “With that out of the way, we can get to work. What do I call you?”

“Captain will do,” Deimos said coolly.

“Well, I don’t need a captain. For the moment, I need a driver, after which, I’ll need a nurse. So be a good boy and fetch us something we can move her in. As for you, my lovey,” she went on as the crisp rapport of bootheels receded. “This will be much easier for both of us if you’re not squirming about, so we’ll just start off with one of these.”

A sharp pinching sensation high on Lan’s arm, followed by a spreading heat and more of that squeezing pressure. Lan tried again to speak, but managed only a fussy little cry like the squeaking of a poisoned rat. Then, nothing.

* * *

The first time Lan opened her eyes after that, she thought she was dreaming of the dining hall. She could see a thousand glinting lights and hear Azrael’s flute player piping away at something soft and sad. She listened, uncomfortably aware that she was wearing nothing but a sheet, until the lack of food-smells finally permeated her sleep-thick brain. As her vision cleared, she realized the lights she saw were not crystal goblets and candlesticks, but only a little light coming in through the open hall door and reflecting off the small forest of metal poles surrounding the bed. The poles supported machines whose colorful faces displayed lights, wavy lines and numbers in constant flux, none of which had any relevance that Lan could see.

But the flute player was real. She sat cross-legged on a bed next to Lan’s own, her eyes shut and brow furrowed, solemnly playing to a blank wall. Stretching between them, black in the borrowed light, was what at first glance appeared to be a ribbon. It grew from the flute player’s arm, falling in an elegant curve until it reached a machine of sorts. It entered one side of that softly humming device and exited the other side, climbing up in another gentle loop until it burrowed into Lan’s wrist at the epicenter of that throbbing, vise-like pressure.

Lan lifted her arm an inch or two in its leather restraints and frowned at it, seeing red and brown smears under the clear tape that held that plastic tube to her, and slowly understood what she was seeing.

The music stopped abruptly. Lan looked over and saw the other girl looking back at her. She lowered her flute, expressionless. Pale light outlined the tubing that took her blood…and gave it to Lan.

“Are you okay?” Lan croaked.

The flute player glanced at her arm, where the tube bit into her. She said nothing.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry, are you?” The girl’s voice was like her instrument, silvery and a bit too shrill. Her eyes flashed, then dropped. “Suppose I should be grateful he had more than me to dip from, seeing as I’m nothing more to him now than a cow he can milk for you.”

“Oh now,” Lan said lamely. “He wouldn’t—”

“He wouldn’t, eh? He did! At least, his doctors did, the deadhead and the breather both. He didn’t even bother to be there. He was still in here, holding your hand, most like. It’s so unfair,” she grumbled, twisting the segments of her flute back and forth, back and forth. It squeaked with every revolution, scarcely audible, like a dying rat. “I told him one time—one time!—I couldn’t and he put me out. You cut your throat to get away from him and see what he does!” She waved her tapped arm, then winced and gripped at it. “Just for you.”

Lan’s head was already swimming and the other woman’s accusatory stare and resentful tone only made it worse. She tried to sit up, but the restraints held no more than an inch or two of slack and all she could manage was to crane her neck a little. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Do you…want him back?”

“I don’t want him! No one comes here because they want to feel that awful…deadalive thing—” She broke off, flushed and scornful, to go on the attack. “Did you come here for him, eh? Is this whole fool crusade of yours just a ploy to get in his bed? No. So don’t turn this on me like I’m some jealous chavvy. You’re no better than me.”

“I never said—”

“Oh, I’m sure you say plenty. I see you sitting beside him every night, acting like the lady of the bloody manor when you’re just another dolly. Who says your reasons are so much better than mine? End the Eaters,” she sneered. “You know you just say that to sound grand about getting on your knees for him, like you’re saving more than your own skin. You’re not fooling anyone.” The woman looked down at her flute. “There’s no one else left out there who knows how to play this. Leastwise, no one I’ve met. The ferryman who sold it to me didn’t even know what it was. He was taking it to the smithy to be melted down. That’s all it is now…scrap. In a hundred years, no one will even know what it was called.”

Lan could say nothing. The whole conversation had begun to take on an oddly dreamlike quality. She closed her eyes, counting (not without some difficulty) to ten before opening them again, expecting to find the room empty. Instead, she saw the flute player with the wet shine of tears on her cheeks, still gazing at her flute.

“I taught myself to play it,” she was saying. “It has its own language, did you know? A whole kind of writing just for music. No one else in Wodicote could read it, nor wanted to. Wodicote is all sheep and dye.” Her face puckered up with shaky scorn, even as her eyes dripped tears. “My Da’ beat me when he found out. Said every second I wasted on it was a penny I stole from the family pocket. I had to hide to do my learning. Over the walls, in the woods, where the Eaters could have come at any time, just to play. When did you ever risk so much?”

“I…” That sense of unreality grew. She’d risked everything…everything she hadn’t already lost. She’d walked from Norwood to Ashcroft, like her mother walking eleven years of roads in the strange dead land to which she’d been sent, alone. She’d walked with nothing but a hunting knife and rucksack full of peaches…or had she? Had she even left? Could she still be in Norwood, dreaming all this from her bed in the Women’s Lodge with the smoke from her mother’s fire matting up her hair and old Mother Muggs going stealthily through her pockets for loose ‘slip? How much easier it was to believe that than to believe she was here, in this clean white room, because Azrael wanted her life saved.

The flute player did not seem to notice her silence. She was still talking, shooting anger like bullets into every word. “When the baby died, it was my fault, he said, because I was away piping instead of, what? Home to watch? He got it away from me and beat me with it until it bent and then he turned me out. He made me a beggar on the streets of my own town while you were picking peaches with your mum and living high in Norwood. I went away with the next ferry to come through and I was years going town to town, looking for another flute in a world that couldn’t see the need for them. I came here because I had to, because he’s the only one left who can give me music…the only one left who wants to hear it. Well, it’s beautiful!” she insisted, almost hissing it, clutching the flute in both hands as though she thought Lan would leap from her bed and snatch it away. “It’s beautiful and it’s worth saving!”

“It is,” said Lan. “I know it is.”

“You don’t know! I see you, the way you look at me when I play! I…I…I’m the best musician alive in the whole world and you just hear noise!” Her mouth worked, the corners grotesquely downturned, so that she looked like a talking-doll in the hands of a bad puppeteer. “I’m the best musician alive in the whole world,” she said again. “The rest are all deadheads. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? That’s nothing to be proud of at all. That’s awful.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. I play…” The other woman brought her flute to her lips and blew a ripple of complicated sound while her eyes flashed defiantly above her dancing fingers. When she was done, she held the flute up in her fist and shook it like a spear. “I play just as good as any deadhead he raised. They don’t eat or sleep or look after stupid, stinking sheep. They do nothing but practice all day and all night, ever since his ascension. Thirty years, that’s what Cello says. Thirty years and I play with them and I never slip a note. And he listens.” Her eyes shifted, staring into the featureless, white wall over Lan’s head. The anger bled away from her body, leaving her slumped and small on the bed. “He told me it was my voice…my true voice. And when he said it, I believed it. He could make me say things with music I could never say with words. And when I played for him…I knew he really listened…and I could forget what he was.” Her lip curled ever so slightly in an unconscious moue of revulsion. “But then he’d touch me.”

Protests rose in Lan’s throat like bile. She couldn’t quite swallow them. “He’s not so bad as that.”

The flute player looked at her, shook her head, looked away. “Sure. That’s why you cut your throat. Because it felt so good to have him on you. In you.” She shuddered, her grip tightening on her flute. “That dead skin…pressing up on me…and the sounds it made! That slithery, dead, dry sound. You couldn’t touch him anywhere, not anywhere, that you didn’t touch his scars. They felt like worms, dried-up worms, eating at him, eating at me! And sometimes, he’d move so I could feel his bones! His bones! Rubbing on me!” She let go her flute to clap a hand over her mouth, twisting aside to lean out over the edge of the bed, where she held herself in that hunched, stiff and trembling posture of a person struggling not to be sick.

Azrael was the God of all that remained of this world, God and Devil both. His was the only power. His was the only law. He was immoveable, impervious, eternal. He did not need Lan, half in her sickbed and half in dreams of Norwood, to defend him.

Still, she said, “It’s not his fault he’s scarred.”

“It’s not the scars and you know it! It’s him! Leaving aside everything he does, look at what he is!”

“He’s what we made him.”

“Nothing made him. He just is.” The flute player looked at her—the strained, hot stare of someone who knows she will never convince a fool—and said, “Near Wodicote, there’s a little valley where the sheep won’t graze. There, the grass grows in funny knots and makes a funny hiss when the wind blows. We call it Blue Golly, always have, but it’s the Blood Gully, really. Hundreds of years ago, it was a normal place and the old villages could take their sheep there just fine, but one day, there was a strange wind and a storm with no rain, and the next morning, when they took their sheep out to graze, they found heaps of  jellied blood all over the ground.”

“Yeah, right, and in Norwood, there’s an elf-ring in the forest and if you stand in it, you can see the old cities lit up with lights and watch the shadows of the old people walking around like ghosts.”

“No, it’s true. Blood. In great, curdled heaps, still steaming in the morning frost. They had to scrape it all up with shovels and it took all day. They said the stink was so bad, grown men fainted and had to be stacked up in the church like cordwood. The jelly was sticky, like tar. They couldn’t scrape it all up, so they dug up the grass wherever it fell and threw the whole mess into the old, dry well, then filled it in and boarded it over. They thought it would be all right then, but the grass grew back strange and the sheep wouldn’t go near it. They still don’t.”

“Why are you telling me this? What’s this got to do with Azrael?”

“They’re the same thing. Blood fell in the valley, but that doesn’t make it rain and the ground where it sat will never be right. And him…he may look like a man, but he’ll never be one. He can live in a fine palace and drink from a cup and fuck his dollies on a fancy bed, but he’ll always be a thing pretending to be a man.”

“So go home,” Lan said with all the heat her bloodless body could muster. “He’ll let you. He’ll miss your music—”

The flute player flinched just a little, but didn’t drop her eyes.

“—but he’ll let you go. He’ll get Deimos to drive you there safe and I bet he’ll even send you off with plenty of food and blankets and all if you ask. Even a spare flute for when your father breaks that one, because Azrael at least would be sorry if the world ran out of music. And maybe that doesn’t make him a man, but who said a man was such a great thing to be anyway? I’ve known lots of men and let me tell you, drinking from a cup isn’t what makes one good.”

The other woman continued to hold her stare as Lan dropped exhausted back into her bed. After a few moments of expressionless silence, she reached up and plucked a shockingly long needle from her arm, severing the connection between them. Unfolding her long legs, she rose from her bed and moved to stand at the foot of Lan’s, paying no attention whatever to the blood trickling down her arm, off her fingers, onto the floor. “I fucked him too,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not pretending I didn’t, but at least I’m ashamed. I may have been his dolly, but never a traitor.”

Outrage gave her a brief blush of strength, enough to say, “Who are you calling traitor? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to—”

“Yeah, yeah, end the Eaters and save the world. You’re a liar. You don’t even believe that swill anymore. I see you with him, the way you smile when he’s chatting you up, even the way you fight. You’re in love with him. He doesn’t ask for that,” she said with a contempt that transformed her pretty features into something haglike. “You do it on your own. You turned your slag back on the whole human race and everything that’s natural and alive. You make me sick.”

Lan groped through her churning thoughts for a rational argument and found one: “Fuck you.”

The machine squatting between their two beds suddenly let out a shrill bleep, as though to signal a point-penalty and end the round, then followed it with a blinking light and a few even louder bleeps. The sound of running feet came from the hall a short time before a dead man and a living woman wrestled each other through the door—her doctors. The dead man won, pushing the flute player rudely aside on his way to Lan. The woman came after, giving the flute player’s bloody arm a speculative stare before going to the machine. One touch silenced its noise and then she, too, was bent over the bed, competing with the dead man to see who could pry at Lan’s eyes and pinch her wrists and tug at the most bandages.

“What is it?” And that was Deimos, although Lan couldn’t see him through the wall of doctor-coats and it didn’t sound as though he came any closer than the doorway. “Is she waking?”

Both doctors exchanged a harried glance as they loomed over her. The dead one said, “No, no,” looking right at Lan’s open eyes. “The needle came loose, that’s all.”

“Get her out of here,” added the live one, jerking her chin toward the place where the flute player stood against the wall with her instrument in both hands, dripping blood down her side. “You might slap a bandage on her, there’s a good nurse, and if we need her back, I’ll let you know.”

As soon as he was gone, the doctors satisfied themselves with whatever they were doing and both leaned back, almost in perfect sync, to frown at one another.

“What do you think?” the dead man murmured.

“She could use another drop and a dram, but I think she looks pretty good,” the woman replied in that rough, no-rubbish voice so much like Lan’s mother’s. “And I think she could still have a reaction to the blood any time over the next half-night, so if we tell your lord she’s improved and she decides to get a fever, even if it isn’t serious…” She let that trail off, raising a questioning brow. “What do you think?”

“I think you have a valid point, but a warning: Our lord’s very insistence on her recovery is baffling to all who know of it. He’s not been very predictable about the patient at the best of times and this…this has made him angrier than I’ve ever seen him.”

Lan’s heart sank, although the words themselves were hardly surprising. “It has?”

They both ignored her.

“Is there a protocol in place for how to survive his lordship’s wrath?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s a remarkably even-tempered man, all things being equal, particularly considering your kind’s never-ending harassment.”

“We were egged on a bit, wouldn’t you say, by the end of the bloody world?!”

“Our lord’s demands upon his ascension were modest ones. If he had not been betrayed and viciously attacked—”

“He raised the bloody dead and wiped out billions of people practically overnight!”

“Do you have to fight about this right now?” Lan asked.

“Well then, maybe you should have given him what he asked for,” the dead doctor concluded with a little sniff. “My only point being, he must have some reason for wanting her made well and I think it would be prudent if we assume it is so that he can exact his own vengeance for injuring herself in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. To any of us, really.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that myself,” said the living doctor, giving Lan’s hand an idle pat. “As a doctor, I can’t say that I approve, but speaking on a strictly personal level, I’m not exactly willing to take her place.”

“Nor am I, which is why I also think if we don’t tell our lord she’s awake and he wanders in as he’s been doing in his odd moments to find her up and well and him not there to see it happen, he might consider himself deprived of an elemental component of some greater plan and we could both find ourselves out in the garden with a pike in our nethers for not keeping him informed.”

“As long as it’s been since I’ve had something hard between my legs, that does not appeal,” the woman said wryly. She looked at Lan. “Right. I say we split the difference, my dear. Keep a watch on her blood pressure and if it holds steady and she stays clear of complications, we’ll bring him in, oh, an hour before dawn. People tend to appreciate news of this sort better when it comes at an inconvenient time.”

“How devious. And until then—” The dead doctor leaned out to a side table and came back with a syringe. “—we see to it that if he pops in, she’s in a convincingly unresponsive, yet recuperative, sleep.”

“You could just ask me to pretend to be asleep if he comes,” Lan said crossly.

“It’s difficult for me to trust your judgment when you’re lying there with a slashed throat,” the woman told her. “Dr. Deadhead, if you please.”

“Certainly, Dr. Warmblood.” The dead man caught Lan’s restrained arm in an even firmer grip and stabbed the needle into her before she could make another argument. “Count to ten,” he suggested, emptying its heavy contents into her with sadistic slowness.

“One,” said Lan.

And that was all.

* * *

She woke as something lifted her arm and slipped a kind of short, coarse sleeve around it, high on her bicep. There was a sense of familiarity in this touch, a kind of ominous foreknowledge that came without memory, only a sense that something was about to happen. Something that hurt. There followed a series of wheezy breaths, reminding Lan so uncomfortably of a poisoned rat that she opened her eyes, but the room was too bright. The light stabbed in through just a slit, turning her vision to a watery white in which no details could be made out, only a very blurry face that could have belonged to anyone. She gave up the effort, sinking back into the dark. The wheezing whatnot wheezed on, and with each exhalation, her arm got pinched tighter and tighter. She tried to pull away. But whatever had her, had her good.

“Get off me,” Lan said. Or tried to. “Grrmfee,” was perhaps a better representation of her efforts.

Something thumped her on the forehead. “Hush,” said a man.

“Leggo.”

Thump. “I said, hush. Don’t you move or I’ll have you back in the cuffs.”

Lan thought that over and concluded that threatening to put her ‘back’ in them meant she was out of them now. She tried to open her eyes and confirm this theory, but all she got for her pains was a swimmy glimpse of the ceiling before her leaden eyelids fell again.

The wheezing stopped. The squeeze was now horrific, like having her arm bit off at the elbow. At length, with a great exhaling hiss, she was released. “Eighty-eight over sixty. Not good, but certainly better than it was.”

“Bassa,” said Lan irritably.

“She’s getting awfully chatty, isn’t she?”

“She’s waking up,” someone else said. Woman’s voice. Not her mother. The other doctor. “For real, this time. We’d better fetch his lordship. Oh nurse!”

Lan winced without opening her eyes at the unexpected shout, like a hammer on her fuzzy brain, then winced again when she deciphered the sound that soon followed as those of a Revenant’s bootheels approaching in a familiar stride. “Don’t call him that,” she tried to say, but the mumble she managed to push out was more a snore than real words.

“Doctor.” Deimos did not bother to disguise his dislike—that one word held whole symphonies of it, in all its varying colors and strains—but if he had comments to make on the subject of his new title, he kept them to himself.

“Go tell your master my patient is coming around. If he wants to see her, I’ll allow it.”

There was the briefest of pauses before the boots walked away, just time enough for Lan, and possibly Deimos as well, to reflect on the audacity of ‘allowing’ Azrael to do anything. And it seemed no sooner had the hard tak-tak of his heels retreated than it returned, bring with it the heavier, softer stride of Azrael in his bare feet. Lan roused herself enough to raise her head, but it was too heavy to hold up.

“Just a few minutes,” the woman said. “It’s important that she rest as much as possible.”

“Leave us.”

The room emptied. Lan tried again to work her eyes open and finally succeeded, only to see Azrael above her, his eyes blazing from the sockets of his horned mask. He was, as the doctor had said, very angry.

They stared at each other in silence as Lan’s head and vision slowly cleared.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I didn’t want to.”

His hand slashed sidelong through the air. “I am not in the mood to hear your lies now, Lan. Whatever your story was, whatever chain of unfortunate accidents you’ve dreamed up to explain yourself—”

“I meant to,” said Lan. “I planned it. You wouldn’t believe how much planning I did. But I didn’t want to.”

His jaw tightened. He walked away, not toward the door but to the window, clasping his hands behind his back. She could see every muscle standing out in sharp relief, coiled too tight, destroying all the sense of calm he intended to convey with this pose.

“Did you get my note?” Lan asked.

“Yes.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to read it…with all the blood.”

He gave that no answer, not even a glance.

“I didn’t realize how much blood there would be. I guess I ruined your bedspread.”

The claws of one hand punched through the skin of his trapped wrist; black fluid welled up, too thick to fall. He did not speak or look at her.

“I know what I did to you, okay? You think I don’t, but I do. I know I hurt you, but don’t you get it? It could only have worked if it hurt you! Do you think I wanted to kill myself? Do you think I did it because I was mad at you or ashamed of being with you? Hell, I’ve never been happier in my whole life, but I had to do it! I had to! Because you left me nothing else to try!”

He breathed, broad shoulders steadily rising and falling. Otherwise, nothing.

“Say something,” Lan said and even though she said it with anger pounding behind her eyes and eating up her guts, it shook in her throat and came out small.

He glanced at her, then took off his mask and, with no other warning, whipped about and threw it into the far wall with force enough that the horns imbedded several inches. It bobbed there, humming softly with the vibrations of impact while Azrael stood staring down at her, his entire body heaving as he breathed. “You,” he said, so quietly, “have always had the very worst notion of what makes up an apology.”

She dropped her eyes, looking down instead at the mountain ranges and rolling valleys of her body beneath the sheet. “I said I was sorry. How do you say that enough after something like this?”

He cursed in some other language, an ugly snarl of sound that seemed to tear the air as it passed through it, and paced across the room, past her bed, to the door.

“Don’t leave me.” Suddenly, she was crying, one hand holding her bandaged throat because it hurt so much. “Please don’t go. Don’t be angry at me anymore. I’m so sorry.”

He struck his fist against the door, then leaned against it for a long time with his head bent and his breath heaving in and out of him, loud as like a smithy bellows. She wanted him to come back. She wanted him to hold her and tell her…anything. He wouldn’t even look at her.

She cried, coughing up tears through razors, scarcely able to breathe, but still forcing out the words. She was sorry, so sorry. Don’t be mad, don’t hate her, don’t go. She was sorry. She hadn’t wanted to do it and she’d never do it again. She was so sorry. Please, Azrael. She loved—

He tore the door open, banging it off the wall, and slammed it shut behind him, final as a gunshot.

Lan struggled after him, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She slipped bonelessly from the bed to the floor, tried to crawl and then just collapsed onto her side and curled up small, weeping into her empty arms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She stayed on under the doctors’ care another eleven days, long enough for them to quietly get on top of the infection that did indeed turn up. Her throat swelled, but wasn’t too bad. It was the gash on her arm that got really ugly, splitting open around her stitches and making her whole arm throb. The layer of bandages that concealed its suppuration were heavy and sweaty; the medicines they gave her made her nauseous and sleepy, often at the same time, to the effect that she occasionally woke up in a cooling pool of her own sick. That wasn’t as bad as it could have been, since her food during those eleven days was either broth or fruit juice, with a just a spot of thin porridge now and then to test her stomach’s stability.

Boredom was worse than the weakness. She had nothing but a window to look at, when she wasn’t staring morosely at the damage Azrael’s mask had done to the wall. She had no visitors, only the doctors, who rarely spoke to her, although they were friendly enough with each other in their own acid sort of way. Now and then, she could even hear the living doctor talking to Deimos, who she seemed to delight in needling, but Lan was nothing to her but a few numbers on a machine. She did hear Azrael’s voice outside her door sometimes, but he never came in to see her again, at least not when she was awake. The doctors made no secret of their suspicion that they were only mending her to be fit enough to plant in his meditation garden, but Lan didn’t think so. And if she was wrong…she wasn’t even sure she cared. Nothing seemed to matter anymore, not like it used to. Her world was a window, a damaged wall, a blinking number on a machine, and the echo of a slamming door.

“I’ll be sorry to see you go, actually,” the living doctor—even Lan had started thinking of her as Dr. Warmblood by then—said as she clipped out the last of her stitches. “It’s been a while since I was able to do any real medicine. Doctoring in New Aylesbury mostly ends in breaking backs. If I had even half the equipment there that I have just in this room!”

“I’m sure if you ask, Azrael will let you take some stuff back with you.”

The doctor startled, then laughed. “Back? You must be joking! Why, my room here is bigger than the mayor’s whole house! Clean clothes, fresh food, electric lights…flush toilets! Did you ever see such a thing? Why would I leave all that?”

“To save lives?”

“Saved yours, didn’t I? And as it’s been my experience that doing oneself in isn’t the sort of thing one does just once, I’ll probably have to save it again.” She eyed Lan’s face and smirked. “I see you don’t agree, but Dr. Deadhead tells me his lordship’s dollies off themselves quite regular-like. You’ll probably go on denying it right up until you stick another knife in your neck, and by the by—” She gave the bandages a final brisk pinch and then tapped the other side of Lan’s neck. “This is the vein, love. Nick that and you’ll be done before you can say Devil’s dolly. All right?”

“Are you…Are you telling me how to kill myself?”

The doctor shrugged. “Just telling you how not to arse it up. That’s what separates us living folk from the Eaters, you know. We can learn. Well…some of us can. Right! Off you go!”

“You’re letting me go?” Lan reached up to touch her neck. Her newborn scar felt raw and waxy and scabby and hot. Her fingers felt like hooks dragging across an open wound. “Already?”

“Soonest begun, soonest done, love. I can send you off with something for the pain, if you like.” The doctor glanced over her shoulder at the open door, then lowered to voice to a scarcely-audible breath. “And I can give you something for later…to make it quick. You can hide it in your cheek until you need it. It isn’t painless or pretty, but it’s quick.”

“No.”

The doctor shrugged. “Suit yourself. Nurse!”

Deimos stepped into the doorway. “Doctor.”

“Escort my patient here wherever it is she calls home and keep a close watch, in case she comes over flowery.”

Deimos put his hand on his sword and held out the other, never taking his steely eyes off the doctor. Lan got out of the bed that had been her prison and walked on stiff legs to join him. She was annoyed to find that being upright after so many days lying-in did indeed have a wilting effect on her, so that she was obliged to actually accept the arm the Revenant offered. The feel of his cold flesh through his immaculate uniform raised the fine hairs all over her body; she tried not to let it show.

As he led her out of her sickroom into an unfamiliar hall, the damned doctor called out, “It’s a pity I won’t see you again either, nurse. Good help is so hard to find and once you’ve trained up some, why, you could almost be adequate!”

The dead don’t have to breathe except to force air through their vocal chords and Deimos did not speak, so there was no reason for him to take that deep breath and let it slowly out again. Lan watched him from the corner of her eye while pretending to keep her full attention on her feet. Her senses, sharpened by days of convalescing boredom, effortlessly brought her the creaking of his leather glove as he adjusted his grip on his sword and the minute flexing of the muscles under her hand, but that was all he did. He did not stop. He did not turn back. He did not knock the head off the doctor’s shoulders with one practiced sweep of that deadly weapon. Whatever emotions he might be feeling, he held them in reserve for the next time Azrael sent him out to slaughter a village.

“Where is he?” Lan asked, now thinking of Azrael.

Deimos did not require clarification. To him, there was only one ‘he’. “Our lord has matters to attend to elsewhere.”

“Matters like sharpening a pike?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What’s he going to do to me?” Lan asked bluntly.

One of the Revenant’s eyebrows arched, although he did not look at her. “Nothing, as far as I know.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“How many other meanings are there?”

“You can’t possibly be saying he forgives me.”

“Oh no.” Deimos actually laughed a little, in a cold, dead way. “No, I’m certainly not saying that. This way.”

She followed Deimos blindly through the maze of halls and out into fresh air and chill sunlight, neither very welcome. He had a car waiting, the only car in all the empty lot, but still he’d parked it in the outlines painted to that purpose, even though it meant a longer walk. There was plenty of room right up by the doors, but there was a sign there saying the space had been reserved for emergency vehicles and Deimos was dead. In absence of direct orders, he could only obey the laws of Haven, where Azrael was lord.

Lan sat quiet while he got the car going and carefully navigated his way out of the lot, just as if there were hundreds of other cars and careless pedestrians to factor in. He even looked both ways before pulling out onto the street. She studied what she could see of his handsome face in the rearview mirror as he drove and finally said, “Do you know why I did what I did?”

“Do I understand your motives, you mean?” His cool eyes tapped at her once and went back to watching the traffic. “Yes.”

“If it was you who had to forgive me…could you?”

The faintest crease appeared between his brows. “I can’t answer that.”

Lan nodded and looked away.

“But only because I don’t care,” he explained.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“I don’t think I meant that the way it sounded.” He heaved another of those curt, unnecessary sighs, his hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I can’t care. About anything, apart from our lord’s will. I can forgive nothing if I can’t take offense.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t imagine that’s much comfort to you. Our lord cares very deeply about things.” Deimos rolled his eyes just a little before adding, “About you.”

The words went through her head and heart a hundred times before she could bring herself to say, “I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

“Oh, it is.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because he’s angry.” He glanced at her with another of those almost-frowns. “That’s probably not very comforting either. I apologize. I’m not very good at comfort.”

He drove in silence through the city while Lan leaned up against the window and watched the buildings roll by. Her eyes had a way of lighting on and identifying architectural details, which put her in mind of Master Wickham. She wondered if he’d been feeding her fish all this time, even though she knew she didn’t have to wonder; he’d said he would and he had. All the same, the thought grew stronger and when at last the car turned onto the familiar road that led to the palace, she said, “What happens to me when we get home?”

“Nothing, as far as I know,” Deimos said again. “You’ll not be kept under my watch, although I doubt he’ll hesitate to give the order, should you make it necessary.”

Her heart sank. She shored it up with thoughts of koi, sparkling like jewels in the water of her garden. “Would it be all right if I go to the library then?”

“No. I’m to take you to our lord’s chambers to be prepared.”

The first image that came to mind on hearing those words was that of the Mayor’s kitchen, a pot over the fire and a hen hanging from a hook.

“For what?” asked Lan.

Deimos gestured vaguely toward the cresting sun. “For dinner.”

“Dinner?” Lan stared at the back of his indifferent head. “Tonight?”

“I had taken to understand you living ate every night.” He glanced at her in the mirror again. “If it’s Lareow you want to see, he asked me to tell you…he found your note.”

She had nothing to say to that but, “Oh.”

“He did not disclose its content to me, but he seemed upset.”

“Oh,” said Lan again. It was still all she could think to say.

“His duties kept him at the palace while you were away. Otherwise, he assured me he would have called on you and that he’ll discuss the matter further when you resume lessons with him tomorrow.”

“Resume…?” She shook her head, not refusing to go as much as trying to throw off her shock as a dog throws off water. “And that’s it? Like nothing ever happened?”

“I should think you would be grateful for that.” Deimos considered that and smiled a Revenant’s steel-edged smile. “Our lord is so very angry.”

The rest of the drive passed without conversation and soon enough, she was back in the palace, approaching the door to Azrael’s bedchamber. There, Deimos passed her into the care of Serafina, who did not appear to be overwhelmed with sentiment at her return.

Lan was made to stand while her handmaiden stripped away her bandages and then circled her several times, inspecting the damage. At length, Serafina punched her hands onto her hips in a resolute manner and declared, “Well, you weren’t what anyone would call a great beauty beforehand, so you haven’t ruined much. At best, you’ve put another stain on a fusty drape, but it’s still my job to iron it. Get in the bath. I have—”

“The doctor said not to get my wounds wet.”

“Or what, they’ll scar?” Serafina asked, putting a poisonous twist on the last word that would have done Batuuli proud.

“They might get infected.”

“I’ll risk it. You stink. And if you’d let me finish, you might have heard me say I have something for you.” Head high, Serafina stalked over to the row of bottles Azrael kept at the side of the bath. One of them had been set a little apart from the others and it was this one Serafina picked up and brought back to her. She opened the jar, dipped her fingers in the colorless, pungent ointment it contained, and daubed it none too carefully on Lan’s neck. It was cold and had a prickly sort of sensation that was not quite an itch.

“What is it?” Lan asked, now holding out her arm so Serafina could smear the stuff over her ‘practice’ cut. It had not been a straight line to begin with and the subsequent infection had pulled it even further out of shape. The raised dots where the stitches had been made it look a bit like an old railway track.

“How should I know? Lord Azrael said you were to have it, to keep the wet out. Although why he should show you such consideration after what you have done, I’m sure I don’t know. Now get in the bath.”

Lan obeyed, sitting on the third descending stair with her arm propped up along the lip of the bath so that she was as fully enveloped as she could be without submerging her wounds. She could see water beading up over the ointment where errant splashes found her arm, so the stuff did seem to be working, but she doubted it would hold up very long if she went all the way under. And she was tempted to. The doctors had wiped her down fairly often during her long lie-in, but that was no substitute for a good soaking. Once, she would have been appalled to see herself wasting so much clean water, but the thought had no substance now. It blew through her like a ghost, briefly disturbing and then forgotten. She leaned into the uncomfortably right-angled wall and closed her eyes, letting the heat relax her body and the familiar sound of her handmaiden muttering just loudly enough to be heard over the fountain soothe her mind.

She was home.

Gradually, it dawned on her that the last time she’d been in this bath, Azrael had been with her. He’d sat just where she sat now and she’d been curled around him and the knife had been under the mattress, just waiting for him to leave. She got up, wading deeper into the water, but the thought followed her. She found herself looking out over the tiles, searching for bloodstains. She found none, but she had bled here. A lot. Some of that blood might have plausibly trickled over the stone floor and dripped into the bath. She might be bathing in her own blood even now.

Lan braced her hands on the lip of the bath and hupped herself noisily up and over. Her arms didn’t want to hold her, so she ended up kick-rolling free of the water, which put her beneath the table where Azrael kept his masks.

A moment later, Serafina stuck her head around the privacy screen and, seeing her, squeezed her eyes shut and pinched at the bridge of her nose. “What is the matter with you? Just…what…I can’t even…I don’t have time for this.” And she went back around the screen.

Lan crawled out from under the table and used it to pull herself to her feet. It took longer than it should have, so she was still standing there, waiting for her legs to get steady enough to let go of the table, when Serafina came back to rough her over with a towel.

“You didn’t even wash your hair,” she grumbled. “Oh, you’re a mess, just a mess. I can’t let you be seen like this. Back in the bath!”

“No.”

Serafina caught her by the arm and swung her around. “I’m not arguing with you!”

Neither was Lan. She punched her. She’d been aiming for her ear, but her aim was off; she got her handmaiden right in the eye.

Serafina staggered, one hand clapped to her face, staring at her through her fingers.

Lan picked up her towel, dropped in the scuffle, and wrapped herself. She went to stand by the fire, staring into its steady orange light. She thought of Azrael’s eyes and found herself wondering how they worked and if everything he saw came to him through a stain of pale flame.

Behind her, Serafina went to the wardrobe and took out a gown. “I need to have this altered before dinner,” she said stiffly, crossing the room in a whisper of skirts. “If you want to rest until then, I’ll wake you when I return. Perhaps you’ll be in better humor.”

Alone again, Lan reached up and rubbed a hank of limp, grungy hair between her fingers. It did need washing. She didn’t want to go to dinner tonight, but what did that matter? Azrael wanted her, so she’d go. And she’d go with her hair clean and brushed and all done up. Her scars would be covered. Her face, painted. Everyone would know what she’d done, but they’d never know to look at her.

Like this room, she thought. There was no blood in the water. Azrael’s servants were quite practiced at erasing death. Even now, knowing what she’d done, she could look around and see no sign. They’d scrubbed up every drop that had ever spilled out of her. They’d done it before; they’d do it again.

She’d come to Haven to end the Eaters, save the world, change everything. Well, nothing had ended. No one was saved. The only thing that had changed was Lan herself.

She thought about that for a long time as she stared into the fire. Then she washed her hair and put herself to bed so she wouldn’t look tired when she saw Azrael at dinner. If she woke with tears on her cheeks, well, so what? She didn’t remember her dreams. It was like she never had them at all.

* * *

“You look tired,” Serafina said, frowning as she examined Lan’s painted face. “I thought you said you slept.”

“I did.”

“Well, you look awful. Your eyes are all swollen…Were you crying?” she snapped, as if Lan had done it solely to spite her.

“No.” And, because she was a horrible person, she added sourly, “Your eye isn’t swollen. Didn’t I hit you hard enough?”

“I’m dead. I don’t bruise. Hold still.” Serafina brushed on more paints, focusing on Lan’s eyes, then stood back to scrutinize her at arm’s length. After tipping her head this way and that, she flung up both arms dramatically and started packing away her brushes and jars. “That’s the best I can do. Wait.”

Lan waited while Serafina ran to the wardrobe, returning with a bit of wide ribbon and a clunky brooch. She had to wrap the ribbon around Lan’s neck three times to cover all her scar and she pricked her when she pinned the brooch on.

“It’s too tight,” Lan said.

“They’re supposed to be tight, that’s why they’re called chokers.”

“How am I supposed to eat with this thing strangling me?” Lan asked, reaching up to try and loosen it—not take it off, but just loosen it.

Serafina slapped her hand and turned away with a sniff. “If you wish to remind our lord of how dreadfully you’ve managed to mutilate yourself, by all means, take it off.” She went ahead of her to open the door, muttering, “The other one was much prettier anyway and far more appreciative of my efforts.”

Lan was all the way out in the hall before the full impact of that little remark struck. She halted mid-step and turned around. “What other one?”

Serafina shut the door on her.

Lan took a step toward it, then looked at the dozen or so pikemen lined up along the walls. “Has…Has he brought another dolly here?”

None of them looked at her, but one of them coughed. The dead don’t breathe and they don’t get tickles in their throats. They all faced straight ahead, emotionless and immoveable as statues, and Lan stood in the middle and felt the silence like it was laughter. At last, she started walking again, pretending it didn’t matter. Hell, it might not even be true. And even if it was, what difference did it make if Azrael planted his oats in another furrow now and then? She wasn’t the only dolly on his shelf. She could hardly complain about who he took to his bed when she’d left it so dramatically. Besides, she was the one he wanted now. She was the one whose life he’d wanted saved, so who cared if he got a bit somewhere else while he was saving it? It’d be silly to feel even a little jealous.

This didn’t feel like jealousy. She’d felt that before. She’d grown up with that bitter taste, knew it as well as she knew the taste of peaches. This didn’t feel like jealousy at all. It felt like death.

Dinner had already been served when Lan reached the dining hall. The musicians were already playing. The fake nobility of Azrael’s court were already pretending to be amused as they pretended to eat and drink. No one took any notice of her, not even Azrael, sitting alone at the imperial table and gazing broodingly up at one of the windows. It was like opening a book in the middle or walking into someone else’s dream, herself a mere spectator, unable either to follow the story or to affect it.

Then Azrael saw her. He stood and immediately, all talk and laughter ceased as his courtiers swung their hundred heads to look at her also. The musicians played on as they always did. The flute player never bent a note as Lan walked by; she wore a ribbon too, around her arm where the blood had been taken from her.

The hall had never been so long, not even the first time she’d crossed it. Azrael came down from his dais to meet her and offer her his arm to ascend the short stair. ‘What other girl?’ Lan thought, watching her feet move, one after the other, up those steps and around the table. Did she sit in this chair beside him? Did she drink from this cup? And where was she now, tonight? Did she get what she wanted and push on or was she still here in the palace, waiting to be called?

Azrael retook his throne and looked at her, just looked.

She looked back at him, hardly seeing his mask, but only his eyes, trying to see some clue in them to tell her how he saw her. She saw only shadow and flame.

Below them, the braver of his courtiers began a cautious return to their play-acted revelry. Others gradually joined in and soon the room was swallowed in their noise once more.

Azrael picked up his cup and turned his gaze out into the room. “I should not have sent for you so soon.”

He said it in no special way, but her heart leapt all the same—a cold roll that tumbled all the way down to her stomach and lay like lead. “Don’t I look all right?”

His eyes flared as he watched his musicians play. Otherwise, he did not respond.

Lan reached self-consciously to touch her rouged cheek, then lower…to the ribbon that covered her scar. She let her hands fall to her lap, watching them twist and knot together until his hand dropped over them. She went still at once, but he kept his hand where it was, as if he thought she’d jump the table and run out the door if he took it away. His grip was gentle, his fingers only lightly curled. It was almost like holding hands. If she didn’t look at him, if she didn’t have to see his anger burning out from the sockets of his snarling mask, she could pretend.

The music played, setting a light, quick rhythm for the forced laughter and inane prattle to follow. When the song ended, a slow one started. Most of the instruments went quiet. The flute sang out, low and clear and grieving.

Azrael’s eye fell to the knife beside his plate. He listened to the music and said nothing.

“Azrael…”

He took his hand back, picked up the knife and stabbed a chop, transferring it from its serving dish to his own plate. It was lamb, very rare. The juices that welled when he cut into it were red as blood. “Yes?”

“Do you want me to go?”

He ate without looking at her. “No.”

“I don’t think you want me to stay anymore either.”

He did not correct her.

“I could—” Nervously, Lan reached toward her utensils, just wanting something in her hand to fidget with. In the next instant, Azrael had her knife and banged it down on the other side of his plate. He kept eating, the way he had the day Batuuli poisoned him, methodically and without pleasure. “I could go back to the Red Room for a while,” she finished softly.

“No.”

“Until you want me again. If you—”

“I want you now.”

The words should have comforted her, but the flat, cold manner in which he spoke them robbed her of all relief.

She should let it go at that, take whatever thin shadow of hope there was and hold onto it until he gave her something more. The very last thing she ought to do was shine a light on the growing space between them.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she ventured. “I know I broke…everything I may have built and I don’t expect….Listen, if you’d rather be with the other girl, I’m not going to make trouble.”

His knife and fork stopped briefly, then resumed scraping against his plate. “What is it you think you know about her?”

“Just that there is one,” she admitted and shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I’ve always known that much. And it’s all right. If she makes you happy—”

“Do I look happy?” His silverware slammed down on the last word, cracking the edge of his plate. He looked down, fangs bared, and dashed the broken plate aside with a sweep of his arm. A servant darted invisibly in to clear the pieces; another brought a fresh setting.

“I just thought—”

“You just thought so little of me that you believed I would fuck a stranger to pass the time while I waited to hear if you would live!” He sent the servants back to the wall with a curt wave and threw another chop on his new plate. “She came to the gate, a starved and desperate wretch of a woman, scarcely ahead of the hungering dead. And for that you lay dying, I was moved to bring her in. I placed her in your handmaid’s care, to be cleaned and her wounds tended, fed and rested and supplied, before I sent her on to a human settlement. I never set eyes on her!”

“Oh.”

“It’s gratifying to know I would have your approval to take another concubine, but you know, there are other ways to remove yourself from my bed than on the edge of a knife.”

“You know that’s not why I did it.”

“But you did do it,” he said savagely, then took several steadying breaths. “You did it,” he repeated, calmly this time. “I don’t care why.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Words.”

“I don’t know what else to say except I’m sorry and you can only say that so many times. If you—”

“Why?” he interrupted. His voice was no louder, no sharper, and if it held any emotion at all, it wasn’t enough to register beyond a detached sort of interest. It was a familiar tone, one she’d heard twice before—once on her first night in Haven and once when she’d watched him interrogate the woman and child from Mallowton. Was that what this was? Was that what she had become to him?

“I told you why,” she said, her heart sinking. “I didn’t want to, I just—”

“Why are you sorry? For what you did?” He stabbed a glance at her. “Or are you only sorry it didn’t work the way you planned?”

“I’m sorry for all of it. And especially that it hurt y—”

He slammed his fist down on the table, rattling dishes and silencing all his court but for his musicians, who played sadly on as he roared, “You’re not the least bit sorry for that, you lying bitch! That was the hingepin of your whole poisonous plot, to hurt me and to make me remember that hurt the rest of my eternal life! Whether I have you back or not, no matter how sweetly you take me in or how soft your lips, I will never be free of that moment, and that is just how you planned it, so damn you and damn your hollow sorries!”

Tears overspilled her eyes and cut hot lines down her cheeks, stinging when they soaked into the ribbon around her neck. “That wasn’t the moment I wanted you to remember.”

He clapped a hand to his face, rubbing through the sockets of his mask at his cheek.

“Can you forgive me? Can you ever? I can wait for it if I just know it’s coming. Can you forgive me?”

The music played.

“You don’t think I’m sorry enough for what I did. But I don’t think you really know what I did. Or maybe…maybe you think I don’t know. Well, I do. I did this.” She clutched at the side of her throat, pulling down the ribbon to let the puckered scar beneath show. “You know what this is, Azrael? This was a choice. This was your choice.”

His gaze moved over the tables, the windows, the pikemen…and her. He stared at the scar and his eyes dimmed, their light receding into the sockets of his mask until they were only white points in shadow. “Never did I force your hand.”

“No,” said Lan, pushing the ribbon back over the scar. “I forced yours. Because I knew you would have to let me be an Eater or you’d have to bring me back when you knew it would never really be me or you’d have to let me die. All I had to do was cut. You were the one who had to choose…how you were going to lose me.”

Azrael looked away.

“But I got to end there. I wanted to make you choose and make you live with the choice when I got to end. So, yeah, I’m a coward. I’m everything you said I was. It was hateful and…and monstrous and…and pointless on top of everything because you didn’t have to choose at all. You made me live. I didn’t know…I never would have done it if I’d known you could make me live!” The last word rose to high, shattered cry and there she broke, sobbing hard. “I’m sorry! I’m sorrier than you will ever know! I’m sorry I did it and I’m sorry it didn’t work and I’m sorry for everything I ruined, but you’re just going to have to forgive me, because being sorry doesn’t help!”

He gazed out the window while she wept, his thumbclaw tapping now and then at the side of his cup, keeping time with the music. As her tears subsided, he took up his knife and studied its edge. “You have, as I’ve had occasion to remark in the past, a certain unrefined talent for words, but I am not in the mood. Come to the point.”

She stared at him in dismay, then flung out her arms. “What do you want from me? I’ve got nothing left! Nothing!”

“Honesty!” he snarled. “No more pleas, no more tears, no more pretense! Just say it!”

“Say what?”

He tossed the knife away, sending it clattering over the side of the table for a servant to chase after. “Coward, you say. Hateful and monstrous. And if you heard me say those words, you heard the promise I made after in my…” His furious stare faltered and, for a moment, he was again the Azrael who had been with her, holding her as she lay floating in the very shadow of Death. “…my most desperate hour.”

She reached out to him.

He shoved his throne back. “My moment of weakness,” he spat. “However it happened, my word was given, so come to it. Ask. You needn’t dress it up with sentiment.”

Lan shook her head, her mouth a trembling o, speechless.

“What are you waiting for?” Azrael demanded. “Is the hall not grand enough for your victory? Do you require a more public forum? Shall I summon all of Haven to the streets and find a scepter to pass into your hands? I’m afraid I can’t give you my head on a spike, but I’m sure I could locate a crown for you to take back to Norwood as proof of your triumph.”

“Stop it!” Lan cried.

“Stop what? You won. You always knew you would.” He took up his cup and raised it in a mocking salute. “You want the world, isn’t that what you told me? You were bound to win in the end because you want the world and I just want sex. You played me masterfully and I can’t deny I’ve gotten my end, so ask, Lan, one more time, and then go.”

“Go?” The word cracked in her throat.

“Go home. Go back to your Norwood and tell them all how you bested the devil in his own den. Take a ship, if you like. Cross the sea. Look at the world you’ve saved from Eaters, see all the forests and mountains you’ve missed. Go find your mother’s lost Lanachee and leave a pair of boots in her honor. I don’t care where you go, but I won’t have you here.”

She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her heart was breaking. She could feel it breaking, feel it tearing open, bleeding down into her belly. This was love, was it? This was what all those dovey songs and stories were about? This wound?

He smiled at her and the smile cut even deeper than the knife. “You look surprised. What, did you think you would have it all, the prize and the playing field both? Oh no, Lan. When the game is over, the winner takes the trophy and leaves the field.”

“No.” The word caught in her throat and choked her. She clutched at the strangling ribbon, as if that were to blame, and just held onto it. “No, I won’t.”

He cocked his head. “You won’t? Is that what you say? You won’t?”

“Please.”

“Ah, yes. Please. Once you’ve spent your curses and your fiery rhetoric, you always come back to please. And I’ve always indulged you, but no more. It is long past time you learned you cannot avoid all consequences with tears.” His eyes flashed. “And kisses.”

“Azrael!”

“It is easier to cut than to live with the choices we make, is that not the gist of what you have just said in your…was that an apology? I can never tell with you. No matter. Here is my cut and here is your choice. You put mine on your neck, but as I lack your flair for drama, I’ll have to give you yours in mere words. What’s it to be, child? My hungering dead or Haven?”

“Haven?” Her tears bubbled up as mad laughter. “You think I want Haven?”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you dare—”

“I hate Haven!” she exploded. “I hate every bloody brick of Haven! I hate these gowns—” She fumbled at her corset, tearing loose some of the stays so she could finally take a deep breath and really start the shouting. “—and all this junk!” She ripped the diamond combs from her hair and threw them. They tumbled through the air like dragonflies, all flash and shine, and landed just as hard. She threw her cup next; it would have hit a courtier if he hadn’t dove to the floor, peeking foolishly up at her under a curtain made of tablecloth. She threw a vase of flowers and a handful of spoons and a bowl of bread while servants exchanged inquiring glances, uncertain whether they should be cleaning it all up now or wait until she was through.

“I hate your stupid books and your lessons and…and I hate your musicians!” she shouted at them while they played calmly on. She threw a plate, but it went whizzing well off to one side and hit a pikeman instead. “I hate this…this stupid tea party with all your stupid…dead…toys!” She seized the edge of the imperial table and heaved it over as Deimos stepped calmly back to avoid getting gravy on his boots. “I hate it here! I hated it from the first fucking day!”

No one answered. A few courtiers had stood, poised to flee at her next sudden movement, but most stayed in their seats, watching her like her outburst was just another spectacle performed for their amusement. Lan stood panting with her hair falling in her face and her corset hanging half-open, glaring at all of them while they waited to see what she’d do next. She eyed her chair, but her strength was spent and she turned away from it empty-handed to meet Azrael’s blazing, unsteady gaze. “You’re all I want in Haven,” she told him.

His jaw clenched. He dragged in several breaths and threw a laugh at her like a fist. “I’ve been your fool more than I care to admit in company, but I’m not so much a fool as that.”

Lan started to speak, then gave up and went to him. He leaned back into his throne as she approached, but did not move when she reached for him. He remained still, silent, as she tugged at his mask and fought the fastens open. When she pulled it away at last, she gave its empty-eyed, snarling face only an incurious glance before letting it drop. She touched him, watching her fingers travel along the broken landscape of his flesh. Then she bent, as he sat unmoving as a statue, and kissed him.

The music came to a discordant stop and now it really was silent. Perfectly, dangerously silent.

Lan closed her eyes, not to shut him out, but to better see him. Her hands moved over familiar scars, following the chasm of his cheek down to his chest and up again, easing him further back into his throne to make room for her on his lap. Her lips pressed harder and softer against his mouth as she straddled him, then with firm intent when she was settled. He gave her no encouragement, but his body belied his seeming disinterest and when she began to rock her hips gently against the rising evidence of his arousal, he gave in and kissed her back. Their tongues met; she teased at him and withdrew, letting him chase and conquer.

As she leaned back, he pressed forward and now her arms were entwined around his neck, her hands stroking the living bone protruding along his spine. He countered by sweeping his arms around her, closing her fast in his unnatural cold and kissing hard all the way down her arched throat until that damned ribbon cut him off. His feelings mirrored hers; with an impatient slash of his claws, he pulled it away, then buried his face against her bare skin. She felt the rough point of his tongue trace the outline of her scar, then move hungrily to the throbbing vein at the opposite side of her neck, as if to taste the proof of her life.

The sound of her soft moan filled the whole of the hall, punctuated by the metallic clatter of a flute falling to the floor and running feet as its player fled. The rest of the musicians conferred in whispers and began again to play, something slow and full of strings. Azrael glanced at them and sighed.

“Haven’s nothing but a dollhouse,” Lan said softly. “It’s pretty and, yeah, you got the best dolls, but I don’t need it. I don’t even want it.” She cupped his face and pressed her brow to his, feeling the warmth of his eyelight on her skin and tasting spiced wine on his breath. “I want you.”

“Sweet words.” His voice hardened. “A poison mouth.”

“Oh Azrael,” she sighed. “You always know when I’m lying, but you don’t always know when I’m not. I want you. Just you. I know you hate me now—”

“Not at the moment,” he murmured and sighed. “Stay then. Stay and speak no more of my hungering dead. Surrender that world forever and abide with me in this one.”

“Azrael, please! I can’t…I can’t let the world die to be with you! And I can’t lose you! I…” She looked out over the dining hall, suddenly remembering their audience, and yes, they were all still there and all still watching. “Please don’t ask me to choose.”

He combed his claws once through her disheveled hair and kissed her shoulder where her loosened gown had slipped to expose it, oblivious to the guards, servants and dinner guests staring up at their lord’s loveplay. “No more games, Lan. No more negotiations. The time has come to decide what you want most.”

She stared at him, anguished, pleading with every part of her but her voice.

“Ask me to end the Eaters, Lan. I will end them, but it will not end the war, and without the dead to keep the living at bay, they will come here. I will be forced to meet them and whether I defeat them or they defeat me, there will be blood—” Holding her eyes, he took gentle hold of her wrists and brought her empty, open hands up between them. “—and it will be on your hands. You propose to destroy the dream of peace that is Haven, and for nothing. You can save no one. You can only sound the horn of Armageddon.”

She shut her eyes, knocking tears free to burn twin trails down her cheeks, but they were the last two.

He wiped them away with the rough pad of his thumb. “But if ever I made a home for you once, let me do it again. Here, I can spare you all the evils of the world—hunger, cold, pain, fear…death. I shall remake Haven itself to your will. No more gowns. No more court. No more meditations in my garden. I can be…merciful…with you to remind me why I should. Lan…”

She opened her eyes, already looking down into his.

“Stay with me,” he said haltingly. “Please.”

“Azrael, I…I love you. I want to be with you. I want that more than anything—”

He stiffened, all over, all at once. Slowly, he began to smile and in that moment, she saw for the first time through the scars and not just around them, to the face of the man he might have been, that he might someday be again if only he were allowed to heal.

“—but not more than everything,” she finished softly. “End the Eaters.”

His smile fell away, leaving behind an awful emptiness.

Elsewhere in the room, someone decided to leave, beginning a subdued yet rapid movement that emptied the great hall in minutes, and throughout it all, Azrael just looked at her. When they were alone, but for the pikemen lining the walls and Deimos watching from the foot of the dais, Azrael quietly said, “Done.”

She felt it going out of him, punching through her in a cold pulse, making no sound and having no substance, but hammering to the very foundation of her heart just the same. Then he lifted her from his lap and set her on her feet. He rose, staring straight ahead, and moved away from her. “Captain.”

“My lord.”

“When my guest has collected her composure, escort her to my chambers. She’ll want to change for her journey.”

Lan sank to her knees and covered her face in her shaking hands. She did not cry. After all the tears she’d shed, there were none for this.

“See to it she has food and water and whatever other supplies she may request and see her safely to the settlement of her choosing.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Get her out of here.”

Deimos held out his hand. Lan pushed herself up and took it, moving past Azrael without touching him. He did not look at her. She did not try to tell him goodbye. She left and he let her go and that was the end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Lan had left Norwood the day after her mother’s death, under the new Crow Moon, so it seemed only fitting that she return under another Crow Moon, this one waning and faded behind the clouds. She had Deimos drop her well back, walking the last length so no one would see her getting out of a Revenant’s van. It made no difference. Her year in Haven had marked her, on her flesh and on her soul, and although they let her in, it was never the same. She wasn’t sure she wanted it to be.

There were questions, some. Not so many about the Eaters, lying in rotting heaps around the walls where they had been howling for meat only the day before, but about Haven itself. Were there lights, like the ferrymen said? Was it really like the old cities in the pictures, all clean and full of glass? Was it true there were fields full of every kind of crop, with the dead to tend them, and empty houses, row on row, just being kept by dead maids? How many dead were there, exactly, and how many were Revenants and how many servants? Did the servants serve any master or Azrael alone? To these increasingly disturbing inquiries, Lan said less and less and finally nothing at all except that Haven was for the dead and the living were not welcome there.

“You look like you were made fairly welcome,” Sheriff Neville remarked when he heard this. His eyes crawled slow over her body. “Fairly welcome and then some.”

Mother Muggs gave her a space in the Women’s Lodge, grunting as she did so that it was her charitable nature, for she didn’t have to, not for a penniless beggar and a foreigner such as Lan. It wasn’t her old bed; that, she saw, was occupied now by the woman from Mallowton. Lan tried once to talk with her awhile, but the woman pretended not to know her. She said her name was Ella. She said she came from New Hull. And when Lan tried once, in whispers, to tell her how well Heather was kept in Haven, how she’d been seen by doctors and was getting fed and last Lan knew, was learning to play piano, the woman walked away, calling back in a too-loud voice that talk was Lan had slept up with Azrael in Haven and she didn’t truck with deadhead whores. Lan understood intellectually why she did it, but it still struck hard.

She had nothing. She sold her fine clothes, made just for her by Haven’s tailors, for a half-yield of a row of barley. She took up her old scut work for the Fairchilds, tending the mayor’s animals in the morning and washing up their kitchen at night. For a time, she had offers nearly every night to slip away behind the smoking shed for a private welcome home and maybe a good word spoke the next time her name came up. Most took her refusal with a nod and a shrug, or at worst, a low mutter about deadhead dollies. A few got mean, among them Eithon Fairchild, who’d gone and married that git Elvie, but who would not keep his hands out of her back pockets until she gave him a kick to the jewels. He threatened to have the sheriff on her for that and Lan lost her temper and threatened to have the Revenants on him. After that, she kept to herself.

One day followed another. Crow Moon winked out and Pink Moon grew. Pippa and Posey traded out the last of their winter rows for spring seedlings. Lambs were born. Pigs were bred. And peaches were always in fruit. The age-old rhythm of village life continued its steady beat, but she was not a part of it anymore. She did her work and fell into her bed with all the aches and exhaustion she remembered, but it was not the same. The harder she tried to fit herself back into her old life, the wider the gulf grew until it was insurmountable, but still she needed help to see it.

At Full Pink Moon, the Revenants came. Lan didn’t know. She was scrubbing pots in the knuckle-biting cold water behind the Fairchild’s house when the sheriff came to fetch her. “Come deal with this,” was all he said, so Lan walked out through the gate was to see what she had to deal with. What she saw was Deimos unloading the first of eight crates of food.

“What are you doing here?” she asked stupidly, because she could see the bread and fruits and cheeses.

“My lord’s will,” Deimos replied.

“I didn’t realize…” She reached out to touch a cold joint of mutton and found it not even wholly cold yet. Fresh from Haven’s kitchen, perhaps even from the imperial table. “I thought our arrangement broke when…when we did.”

“For the other villages, yes. Not Norwood.”

“Why?”

Deimos paused in his work just long enough to give her a scathing stare.

Lan fidgeted with a cold boiled potato. “How is he?”

“He endures and remains our glorious lord.” He set the last crate down and shut the van’s doors.

“Will you…Will you tell him I said thank you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell him…” But there, her voice failed her. There was only so much she could say from Norwood and she couldn’t share any of it with the people she knew were standing on the walls behind her, watching and listening.

Deimos waited, but when Lan only stood there, he swung himself up behind the wheel of the van and started the motor.

“How’s my garden?” she blurted.

“He burned it,” said Deimos and drove away.

She stopped working for the Fairchilds—just stopped, without a word of warning or even a lame excuse—and went for walks instead, ranging further and further afield in this new land without Eaters. She took a shovel with her when she walked and buried the dead when she found them. She found a little scrap in the ruins of the old towns and built herself a very sorry sort of house outside Norwood’s walls. She set traps and after some trial and error and a few hungry nights, began to catch enough small game not only to feed herself, but to trade for seedlings, which meant building a greenhouse, and even brought in a little ‘slip.

Full Milk Moon brought Deimos back and again Lan was summoned to meet with him. She asked him how things were in Haven. He told her Haven was the shining light of his lord’s benevolent dominion. Then, somewhat to her surprise, he asked how things were in Norwood. She didn’t know what to tell him, so she said, “Better. Every day, a little more. And we’re grateful.”

Deimos glanced over at the wall and all the hostile faces staring down, waiting for him to leave so they could bring the food in, even though the mayor and the sheriff kept most of it. “So I see.” Then he looked at her and quietly said, “When he gives the order to kill them all, I have to obey. So you’d best be gone before then.” And with that, he left, his sword gleaming in the sunlight.

The weather warmed and the rains came on, sinking Norwood ankle-deep in mud. A few ferrymen came by, sniffing after trade, but there wasn’t much coin in salvage anymore. With the Eaters gone, anyone could do it. Lan’s wanderings brought in better than the kids in their painted vans could offer and she wasn’t quite as foreign, so they rolled on out again in just a few days.

Just before Full Rose Moon, Mother Muggs died and Lan was able to tell Deimos they’d a funeral, a real one. That the funeral was essentially the same as it had always been—a fire, with a few people standing around to stir coals and talk about what a thieving old bitch the dear departed had been—she did not mention. Neither did she mention some of the other things she’d overheard or the growing number of strangers she’d seen in the village, but when she asked how things were in Haven, Deimos simply said the living were discontent.

When he left, the mayor took Lan aside and asked how she’d breached Haven’s walls.

“I didn’t,” she told him. “And you can’t.”

“You got through.”

“I had a ferryman who had the seal of one of the Children, but the Children are dead…and so is the ferryman who took me in. Leave it alone,” she added. “Haven is for the dead.”

His lip curled as he looked at her. “This world is for the living. You need to decide where your loyalties lie.”

A few days later, the guns started coming, crateloads of them, covered over by ratty blankets in the backs of ferries whose old names had been painted over in favor of new ones like The Revenger or Union Jack Attack. When Lan saw this, she marched directly to the mayor’s house, shoving her way in past Eithon and Elvie to a roomful of old men looking at maps. “They don’t die, you fucking fools!” she shouted by way of introductions. “You can shoot every gun in the world dry and it makes no difference! They’re already dead!”

“This is the one I was telling you about,” Mayor Fairchild said and they all looked at her with the same knowing eyes.

“You ever hear of a place called Mallowton?” she demanded and knew at once which of them had. “You never will if you haven’t yet, because there is no more Mallowton. He slaughtered them and he’ll slaughter you and then he’ll slaughter your wives and your children and your dogs! He—”

Eithon slapped her hard enough that she staggered. Before she could right herself, a fist came out from the left and boxed her ear. Another punched into her stomach so that she folded up and then they were on her, jeering and cursing and kicking when she fell. She tried to crawl away, but they enveloped her, all fists and boots and twisted faces, until at last the light exploded behind her eyes and there was blackness.

When she came around, she was in the mud outside the mayor’s house, one eye swelled shut, her mouth and nose caked with blood. The smell of bread and stew wafted on the warm breeze from the cook house. She could hear laughter and talk through those bright windows, see people she’d known all her life leaned up on the wall outside, smoking pipes and watching her try to stand. She went home and they let her alone, but she stayed awake all night anyway, holding her shovel in both hands and watching the door through her one good eye.

In the morning, Mary/Ella was gone and she guessed that was the last warning she needed. Lan packed her rucksack full of whatever food and water she had on hand, sold the rest to the twins to buy her Haven-made boots back, and left Norwood.

“Got a taste for deadhead dick, did you, little Yank?” one of the watchboys called as she passed through the open gate. “Good riddance to you!”

“You’re all going to die,” she told him and she didn’t look back when she said it. She didn’t look back at all.

* * *

She went to Eastport. She thought she’d walk the whole way, now that walking was so easy, but it was rainy and piss-awful and so once again, she only walked as far as Ashcroft and caught a ferry. The ferryman seemed grateful enough just to have a fare and let her ride for a share of her food and a little chat as they bounced down the roads, skirting wide around Haven.  He asked her if it was true a rebellion was building in the north. She asked him what he’d do if it was.

“Get as far from it as a man can,” he replied. “I seen too many pikes set on the walls of empty towns. Will he ever let us alone, do you think?”

“He will if we will,” Lan answered, gazing out the window at the ruined world. “So, no.”

In Eastport, she went down to the shore and sat for a good hour, just looking. The ocean was pretty in the morning light, but cold and damp and smelly. She wondered if it was all like that, all the fine places she’d seen in pictures, if the mountains were noisy and deserts too sandy and those trees you could drive through all sticky with sap. She wondered if there were no fine places after all, only problems you got used to.

When she was done looking, she booked passage on a deep-ferry to the mainland for ten goldslip. She’d always thought it would be a fine, free thing to ride on the ocean, even if it was just the Channel. She was sick the whole way across.

The deep-ferry lit in a French town called Anglais-en-Port, where Lan figured she’d rest up an hour or two to let her stomach settle before she moved on. She found a dockside pub with the distinctly un-pubbish name of Mal Henri’s whose hard-eyed namesake took one long look at her scarred throat, bruised arms and still-swollen eye and gruffly offered to let her draw pints in exchange for a cold pie, a mat in the back and half of whatever tips came her way. She told him she wasn’t staying, but the thought of recouping her ferry-fare and maybe a little extra was too attractive to ignore.

So she stayed, just the night…and the night after…and the night after that. The work was light and Henri kept the louts who frequented his establishment in a kind of drunken order that did not include putting hands on ‘his’ girl. The nightly roaring, singing, brawling and laughter gradually became comfortable to her, even if it wasn’t home and never would be. Each night, after the chairs were up and the lamps trimmed down, she emptied her apron pockets into Henri’s huge, rough hand, and each night, he counted half fairly back to her before he took whatever was left in the house bottle and climbed the stairs to his apartment, leaving her alone with her narrow mat by the stove. When the night inevitably came that he lay his hand gently over her breast, Lan said no and he took it off again. He asked her if she’d been hurt by a man and she had to laugh, because she had been hurt, if not in the way he meant. Then she cried, because after all this time and distance, the wound just wasn’t healing. She cried and he patted her hair like a father might and said soft things in French. He told her she would always have a place with him and he would let her come to him when she was ready. She told him she wasn’t staying, but she stayed one more night.

And one more. And one more.

Somehow, she was still there a month later, when word of the great rebellion reached port. An army ten thousand strong surrounded Haven, they said, and people cheered like that meant something. Lan heard the rumors, recognized the hopeful lies and drunken courage, and waited.

When it happened, it happened fast. For days, there had been only talk of the siege and the inevitable victory that surely must follow where ten thousand fearless men and women pitted themselves against Evil. Then the deep-ferries stopped coming from Eastport and after a full day without word, someone drove up the coast to Old Calais and returned to say that not only had they not had any deep-ferries either, but that there was smoke over the distant shore of England. Not just over Dover, they said, but all of it, as much as could be seen.

It was very quiet in the tavern that night. Men sat by the windows and watched the sea and drank too much in silence.

Eleven days passed, each one like the final blow of the headsman, and in the morning, you had to get up and climb the stair to kneel at the block again.

On the twelfth day, the deep-ferries came back, all of them, one right after the other, and even Lan’s inexpert eye could see them sitting too damn low in the water. The people who got off the boats were quiet, smudged with ash and streaked with tears, blindly staring. They answered no questions, just shuffled off along the docks and milled into the streets. Some had satchels. Some had children. Most had nothing. And after many hours, many boats, Lan saw the first faces she knew. Norwood’s faces, none of them rebels and none of them whole. Pippa without Posey. Elvie without Eithon. Little Abbey and Ivy, hand in hand, but not their mother, Danae.

When the last boat docked, there was only one passenger and he came just far enough to let the silver trimmings of his Revenant’s uniform be seen. Deimos surveyed the crowd below him with his usual lack of expression, then drew his sword and held it up for silence. In a loud, clear voice, he called, “By order of our sovereign lord Azrael, the true and living god; Azrael the Immortal, guardian of the grave; Azrael the Invincible, ruler of all things; be it known the living are banned from the land formerly known as the United Kingdoms, hereafter to be known as the Purged Lands. Any living human found in trespass there will be put to death by impalement. Our lord is merciful. Our lord is merciful.”  He sheathed his sword, started to turn away, then paused and looked back.

The little time he and Lan gazed at each other occupied its own eternity, but as soon as he turned and went back onto the ferry, she realized it had only been a few seconds after all. The ferry chugged away. The crowd began to disperse, muttering amongst itself and giving the refugees narrow stares and a wide berth. Mal Henri tapped Lan’s arm and walked with her back to the tavern because, even if it wasn’t noon yet, people were going to want to drink.

“If anyone asks, you’re my sister’s girl,” he was telling her in his gruff manner. “Folk remember that she had one before she went away, even if you are a bit young. And no more you speak anglais, eh? No more. Now, tu parleras française, oui?”

“I’m not staying,” said Lan, looking back to watch the ferry grow smaller on the sea.

“Put it from your mind, ma fillette,” he grunted, not without a kind of coarse sympathy. “You have no home now.”

But she did and someday, she knew she’d have to go back. But not yet, she decided. She could stay one more night, just to let things settle. Maybe even longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The moon was rising full over the broken walls when Lan returned to Norwood. The moon of mid-winter was called Cold Moon and Dead Moon and sometimes Azrael’s Moon. When she’d been little, the other kids used to scare each other by imagining a skull in the shadowed craters of its face, but of course, it was the same moon. Just a rock, spinning out there in space, oblivious to the rising tides or shivering little kids it affected on Earth. But it made a good lamp, shining bright on the thin crust of snow that lay over the land, so that Lan could walk by night as well as by day and come to the village where she’d been born.

It felt strange, coming back this way. When Deimos had brought her here from Haven, she’d been in a van and looking at the world through a window just wasn’t the same. Walking was more personal, elevating the act to something epic—a journey, a quest. There were no more Eaters to watch for through the still hours of the night, nor were there rogue ferries or caravans of townless folk looking to prey on defenseless travelers. The roads were overgrown to a startling degree, considering it had only been a year. Likewise, the towns she passed along her way showed ages of neglect for the little time they’d been empty. Deer grazed between the broken walls of greenhouses; fields that had been plowed outside the walls for the first time in thirty years now were jungles, their first crop grown wild and gone to seed and weed; wild dogs joined her on her walk now and then, throwing off their feral instincts for half-remembered domesticity, but they all turned back after a short distance, so she came to Norwood alone.

No one hailed her from the wall. The gate doors stood open—beaten open, by the looks of them—so Lan went in. Hers were the only footprints. There were no tire tracks, no lumpy divots in the frozen mud to show where traffic, such as it ever was here, was heaviest. The ferry lot was empty; the charging stations still stood, unsalvaged, still soaking up sun during the days and blinking out their faint green light to show they were ready to power up your batteries. The seed shed and greenhouses were burnt, but the rest of the lodges were mostly undamaged. In the stockyard, she found Sheriff Neville’s faithful hounds, lying frozen where they’d finally starved after eating the goats, the pigs, the Mayor’s feet, and each other. The other bodies, the human bodies, were nothing but skeletons held together by the rags of their clothes and the spikes that impaled them to the thatched roofs where anyone could see them. She identified Neville and his deputies by their clothes, but the rest were beyond all recognition. There weren’t many, in any case. She’d passed a dozen villages and towns in the last month since coming back to England, and they were all like this: a handful of bodies, a mere suggestion of violence, and stillness.

There was nothing else to see here. Lan went to the cook house and down into the cold cellar. It too was untouched by scavenging hands; potatoes and turnips filled their bins, rotted black; apples had withered to the size of walnuts in the barrel; chickens slaughtered the morning of the purge still hung from the rafters, eaten down to feather and bone by the colony of wasps that had built the paper nest bulging out from the wall. She ducked under it, helped herself to a jar of peaches off the shelf and took it upstairs to eat.

A Revenant was waiting for her when she came back into the long hall where the tables were. They looked at each other without speaking for maybe half a minute. Then Lan walked over to a bench and sat. She pulled her knife and used it to peel the wax away and pry the lid up. She scooped out the black scum from the top of the jar, flicked it onto the floor, and said, “Want some?”

“I don’t eat.” But he did come over and sit down on the bench opposite her. He set his unsheathed sword on the table. The curved blade caught a little moonlight through the window and threw it up into Lan’s eyes.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked. The peaches were soft-frozen, making them tasteless and crunchy in their slush. She ate them anyway and thought with every bite how much she hated peaches.

“Oh yes.”

“Will you take me to Haven?”

“As soon as you are content to leave.”

“Out of curiosity…” Lan chopped out a last peach-slice and pushed the jar away. “How long have you been following me?”

His head cocked. “When did you become aware?”

“I never saw you,” she admitted. “I just had that itchy feeling. How long?”

He smiled. “Since you landed.”

“You’ve been tailing me all the way from Eastport? Really?” Lan managed a rueful smile of her own. “That’s just embarrassing. Why did you let me walk all the bloody way to Norwood, then?”

“The captain thought you’d want to see it.”

“Deimos? How thoughtful.” Although still smiling, Lan’s brows slowly knitted. “What did Azrael say?”

The Revenant gazed at her for a long, silent time. Then he rose and picked up his sword, using it to gesture toward the door. “If you are rested?”

“Is something wrong?” Lan asked, rising from the bench in the empty cookhouse at the heart of her abandoned village, silent now but for the rustle and knock of bone when the breeze blew through the corpses impaled to the roofs. She was very dimly aware of the contrast between these two facts, manifesting itself as the ghost of a thought—‘Perspective’—before she said, “Is Azrael all right?”

“Our lord is eternal,” the Revenant replied, which was not exactly an answer, and he seemed to know it. “I will answer no more questions. The captain is waiting for you.”

If he’d known about her ever since she’d landed, Deimos had been waiting two weeks already and another question more or less couldn’t make much of a delay, but Lan did not argue. She started to shoulder her rucksack, then just put it down again. There were things in it still that might be useful to another traveler, but Lan would have no more need for it in Haven and, one way or another, she doubted she’d ever leave. The thought brought no apprehension, only an impatience to be there, to slam the door on this whole past year and be back where she belonged.

“I never should have left,” she murmured, giving her rucksack a push into the middle of the table, unopened. She left it there and nodded at the dead man. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

* * *

The drive from Norwood to Haven was offensively short, considering how long it had taken her to ride in two years ago. The journey that had lasted two months by ferry (“You have not come a long way,” the memory of Azrael reminded her in his dry, smiling way. “You have rode a little, walked a little and waited much.”) took less than a day in the Revenant’s van. True, he drove through the night, needing no rest and taking no special care on the Eater-less roads, but the unfairness of it still rankled.

Without anything to look at or listen to except the droning of the engine, Lan drifted off and slept out most of the trip, waking only twice when the Revenant stopped to charge up at the lifeless waystations along the road. When the sun came up again, its light woke her for good, unfolding through the sickly yellow clouds to show her the blasted hills and crumbling fences that divided the land, with the dark towers of Haven peeking over the horizon. She stretched as best she could in the confines of the vehicle, then reached to roll down the window for some bracing morning air.

“I wouldn’t,” said the Revenant.

She glanced at him, then looked back at the road just in time to see the first pikes come into view.

And then all the rest of them.

She had noticed there weren’t many bodies in the villages. She had even thought, when she bothered to think about it at all, that those she had found were surely only those who had resisted being removed from their homes. The rebels, those who actually marched on Haven and raised weapons against the dead, would be wherever they had fallen…and here they were. The dead, the sheer number of them, defied imagining even as she looked right at them. Fifty was a number, or a hundred or a thousand, but this was beyond counting. After a certain point, trees just become a forest and one cannot see more than that. So it was now: Lan looked and saw only glimpses of what had been men and women, who were now only components of a bodiless whole.

And then they were driving through them, engulfed by a landscape of dead. The wind of their passage made a whicking sound through their dangling leg bones and made their ragged clothing snap out like banners. Their dead heads lolled, turning as if to watch them pass. Their hanging arms shifted, their fingers seemed to point. The sun itself could not be seen through the thickest drifts. They were as branches against a winter sky, interlocked, uncountable.

She could smell them, even with the windows rolled up. It was not the smell of rot—she could only imagine what that would have been like, when all these bodies were fresh—but the smell of death. Old death. Eroded. Cool. It was the smell of clothing that had been rained on and wind-dried a hundred times. It was unwashed hair, dry-rotted hide, weathered bone. It was shit and piss left to lie on the open earth. And it was everywhere, in every breath.

Azrael had done this. She’d known he would, even said he would to those she’d known wouldn’t listen, and if she’d felt anything at all as she took herself away from that doomed place, it had been only bright-burning anger around a hot coal of serves-you-right and then she’d thought of them no more until she saw the first familiar faces turn up in Anglais-en-Port. But now she saw it. Now it was here in front of her and behind her and leaning in on every side and it was not just the people of Norwood or the people of an army, but all of them. It was every person in the world and they were all dead.

The Revenant watched her as he drove. He seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn’t know what. What could she—What could anyone say about this? The horror was too big to even to choke on.

“They came to us,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“The war was over and we were content with its end. They were the ones to bring it back.”

She nodded. She knew that, too.

“What did they think would happen?” the Revenant muttered, bumping over a pike that had fallen across the road.

Lan could only shake her head. They thought they’d win, of course. Wasn’t that the point of every old book and film and fairy tale, that Mankind would prevail? Dragons, demons, aliens, superviruses…zombies…they were all the same shadow, cringing away from the light. And no matter how terrible the threat or how unstoppable it seemed or how many millions of people had to die first, there would always be survivors and if those survivors just…just survived long enough…well, of course they’d win. Because they deserved to. Because they were fighting for their homes and their way of life and for all humanity. Because nothing could be stronger than the human spirit.

But that was only true in stories. The Earth may be Man’s home, but it didn’t have to love them for it, and in its unflinching eyes, humans were parasites, no different and no more deserving of life than any other worm feeding on a body from within. They were not owed victory. That went, as it went in every war, to the one best equipped to fight. The dead couldn’t get any deader; the living could.

They came to the gate and were waved to a halt by the armed guards on watch there, both of whom executed comical double-takes when they saw Lan sitting calmly in the front seat looking back at them. One of them started to order the Revenant out, but stammered to a stop when he saw who he was arresting. The other visibly braced himself and drew his sword, aiming it directly at the Revenant’s amused face. “Traffic of the living is forbidden. You must be taken into custody, by order of Lord Azrael. Exit the vehicle.”

“I need to deal with this. Don’t move.” The Revenant got out of the van and walked a few steps away to speak with them at a distance.

Lan waited, staring fixedly at the walls ahead of her and not the bodies at her back, but she could still hear them. The sound of thousands of limbs knocking gently against their poles and the fluttering of their thousands of ragged clothes muddled together after a while. She tried to pretend she was listening to the waves hitting the shore back in Anglais-en-Port and couldn’t, quite.

The Revenant came back and started up the van’s engine as the guards opened Haven’s gate.

“All sorted out?” Lan asked. She wasn’t really worried for her life, but with the sound of corpses like an endless tide all around her, she wasn’t as confident as she might otherwise have been either.

“Those our lord trusts to keep his peace and protect his domain, he makes Revenants,” the dead man replied, driving into the city and nodding to acknowledge the salutes of the guards. “Those competent in any other skill, he puts to work. Everyone else, he sets to watch.”

“He puts people where he thinks they’ll serve him best.”

“How does it serve him to put fools on the gate?” the Revenant asked scornfully. “Even you got past them once and you don’t strike me as an expert in the art of stealth.”

Lan shrugged that off and said, “He’s bored. You don’t see that? If no one like me ever got in, he’d never have anyone to talk to but you people, and that can’t be much better than talking to himself. No offense.”

He had to think that over before he said, “I think I am offended,” in a mildly curious tone. “Although I suppose I shouldn’t be. I can’t see the fault in your logic. All I can say in rebuttal is that he didn’t make us for our conversational skills and he well could have.”

“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do.”

“I am. I have laid waste to entire settlements single-handedly and killed hundreds of the living without ever taking a scar where one could be seen. I was among those who broke the siege and I did it by going over the wall and engaging those who surrounded us in close combat. There were thousands of them, not even one full hundred of us, and still we prevailed. True, many of them attempted to flee or surrender, but most fought first and I am yet untouched. I took eighteen of their so-called officers and set hundreds of the pikes you saw out there myself.”

“Let’s stop talking,” said Lan softly.

He glanced at her after the manner of one who knows he has been perhaps a bit insensitive, but only in relation to one who is prone to be over-sensitive in the first place. “Forgive me. I was made to take pride in work done well, but I should have recalled that you likely had friends among the rebels. I don’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s all right.”

“If it comes as any comfort to you, we tortured none of them.”

“Apart from being impaled alive, you mean.”

“Yes, apart from that,” he agreed, with no trace of irony. “And most died within a few hours. It’s very unlikely you knew anyone personally who suffered.”

They did not talk again until they had reached the palace. He drove past flowering gardens and servants scrubbing down statuary, through the imposing iron gate and across the inner courtyard, right to the white steps that climbed to the formal front doors where Deimos stood waiting, along with a dozen or so matched pairs of pikemen. But not Azrael.

Lan let herself out of the van, searching the empty windows that overlooked the courtyard for a familiar silhouette and finding only curtains. “Where is he?”

The Revenant did not answer, nor should she have expected him to. It wasn’t his business to know.

“I kind of thought he’d come to meet me,” she said, as if justifying her reason for asking would make any difference. Then, since she was already embarrassing herself, she looked back at him and said, “Does he ever talk about me?”

The dead man looked back at her, his thoughts cool behind his staring eyes, and finally said, “He doesn’t talk to us. You remarked on that yourself.” Then he reached across the seat and pulled her door shut.

Lan stepped back as the van drove away. She could hear its engine long after it had passed the gate and vanished from sight. The empty courtyard and tall, straight walls of the palace caught and amplified every sound. Deimos’s boots walking up behind her might as well have been gunshots.

“I’d forgotten how quiet it is here,” Lan said, without turning. She could see glimpses of movement just over the courtyard wall, where dozens of servants tended the grounds in silence. The dead didn’t gossip or complain or conspire to advance beyond their position. They just did what they were made to do. “It’s hard to believe thousands of people occupy this city.”

“Thousands of people occupy cemeteries, too,” Deimos replied.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Wasn’t it? An odd choice of word to use, occupy. Far more natural to say people live in a city.” His tone was not accusatory, but there was something off about it, enough to make her look at him at last. His face was just as cold and creepily handsome as she remembered, but that same offness was there to be seen just as clearly as she’d heard it. He waited while she studied him in vain for some clue as to what she was looking at, or for, and after a moment, he put his hand out. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is?”

“I hoped you’d come back.”

“You did?”

“To spare me the trouble of coming to get you.” Since she hadn’t taken his hand, he used it to gesture toward the palace, then started up the stairs, trusting her to follow. “I wouldn’t have waited much longer.”

“If he wanted to see me sooner, maybe he shouldn’t have made returning to England punishable by death.”

“There is no more England.”

“There will always be an England. And its displaced people will always come home. You—hang on, you said you wouldn’t have waited.”

“Did I?” Deimos crossed over from the courtyard to the palace floors; his boots stopped tak-takking on stone and instead clump-clumped on carpet.

“You know you did. What does that mean? Why would you wait at all if Azrael ordered you after me…and if he didn’t, why would you come get me?”

Deimos just kept walking, forcing her to keep pace at his side or be left behind. Lan stopped at the threshold to indulge a moment’s frustration, which meant she then had to run to catch him up before he disappeared around a corner. The pikemen stationed at the doors showed no reaction when she raced past, but as soon as she was over the threshold, they shut her in and crossed their pikes. Lan skidded to a stop, Deimos momentarily forgotten as she looked back, but they were faceless once again, staring through her down the wide hall.

Lan could not deny a twinge of apprehension, but she didn’t bother with questions she knew they wouldn’t acknowledge. Instead, she went after Deimos, who wasn’t very likely to answer either, but who could take her to the one man who damn well would.

“Where is he?” she demanded, falling into step at the Revenant’s side. Irritation had a way of lengthening her stride, so that she had to make a conscious effort not to overtake him. “I won’t be his prisoner until he at least has the courtesy to say so himself.”

“You are no one’s prisoner.”

“I don’t appear to be free to leave either.”

“Did you think you would be?”

“Well…no,” she admitted, and because she knew exactly how silly that made her look, even if he didn’t smile, she had to recover herself with a forceful, “I still want to see Azrael. He doesn’t want to see me? That’s too damn bad. Take me to him right now.”

Deimos took a breath and blew it out again in a dead man’s frustrated sigh. “I wish Lareow were here,” he said. “He knew how to talk to the living. He knew how to talk to you.”

Lan’s heart sank down into her knotted stomach. Knew. That was the past tense use of those words. It was Master Wickham himself who’d taught her that, patiently and politely, over and over because she so rarely listened at lessons. Oh, she’d made his job so hard, and now that she thought about it, why hadn’t Wickham come to meet her instead of Deimos? Wasn’t that really more in line with an intermediary’s line of work than a Revenant’s?

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “I don’t mean…damn it, you know what I mean. He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Is he…in the garden?”

“No.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Yes,” Deimos said again. He glanced upward, hunting out his next words in the ceiling tiles, and awkwardly said, “My condolences. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from me. But I also know Lareow was fond of you.”

“Is that what killed him?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“I’m not asking how it happened,” she interrupted. “I’m asking why.”

“No,” said Deimos, staring her down. “You’re asking me to tell you it wasn’t your fault. And I can’t. He liked you. Do you understand what that means? How…unnatural that is for us? You destroyed this place. You destroyed him, his purpose, his meaning. What happened between him and Lord Azrael was nothing but a report filed after the fact.”

To that, Lan could say nothing. In spite of the words themselves, there was no blame in the Revenant’s voice, not so much as a shadow of it on his handsome face, but Wickham was still dead. And she’d liked him, too.

Deimos glanced behind him at the mostly empty hall—a few pikemen stood at the crossways and there were servants at strategic points, cleaning windows and polishing floors—then raised his arm and indicated the first door on the left.

Lan knew she wasn’t going to see Azrael on the other side and she didn’t, but she gave Deimos the benefit of the doubt and waited for him to join her and close the door again before she laid it out. “I don’t want to make trouble for you, Captain, but you’d better tell Azrael—”

“He’s not here.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Go tell him…” The rest of that thought slipped away as a new one took its place. Lan looked inanely around the room, then at Deimos again. “You don’t mean he isn’t here, you mean…he isn’t here. Where is he? Wait, that’s a stupid question. How long has he been gone?”

“I can’t know for certain. I can only tell you that I last saw him when he gave the order to purge the living from his lands. He seemed distracted, but it was a difficult decision for him and I did not find his demeanor suspicious.”

There was an odd stress on the word ‘demeanor’. Not much, just enough to make Lan wonder if she’d heard it at all. “Something put your wind up,” she guessed.

Deimos nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on some point beyond her, as if he were looking right through her and watching that other scene play out. “His orders. I knew they weren’t…right.”

“The purge.”

“The purge?” He focused sharply in on her again. “No, not in and of itself, but…but how he went about it, yes.” He crossed the room in a long, soldierly stride, apparently solely to brace his arm on a tabletop, which was as close to fidgeting as Lan had ever seen any Revenant come. “Perhaps you know that virtually all the dead of Haven were originally raised to serve as his army during his ascension, but only out of the need of the moment. They were not soldiers in life and, as he himself had little knowledge of such matters, in death, they had no particular aptitude for it. His first efforts to create an effective military force were met with limited success and each new wave replaced the one before, until we Revenants were raised.” His chin lifted and shoulders squared, speaking with pride that, objectively, she knew to be justified. “We were the force that won the war. We tore through the armies of the living. We destroyed their best defenses and slaughtered their leaders in their lairs. We drove every last one of them out of Haven in days. We could have purged the living from this land at any time. We were more than enough for the task. All of which I say so that you understand the full impact of what I am about to tell you now.” Deimos leaned forward, cutting each word out separate from the rest and hammering it in place. “He mustered virtually all of Haven for the purge. Ten thousand untrained, unskilled, unarmed…laborers.”

“He emptied the city? The whole city?”

“Save only a small force in the palace to hold watch over the living, his former…companions. One would think he would use Revenants for that purpose at least,” he said with the barest hint of an edge to his voice. “But he chose instead a small group taken from those in domestic service. Now tell me, why would he do that?”

“To make absolutely certain he had only the most inept people on guard,” Lan said slowly.

Deimos pointed at her with grim satisfaction. “I’ve no doubt they were serving tea and biscuits when he left.”

“Are you absolutely sure he’s gone? I mean, this place…it has a lot of empty rooms. Hell, he could have shut himself up anywhere in Haven.”

“It is my business to know every room, every cupboard. My Revenants have made several discreet searches. I am confident he is nowhere in the city.”

“What about his steward or his chamberlain? Or surely a servant must have seen him go, even if they didn’t think much of it.”

“So one would think, but no. He has been prone to odd moods since your departure and it had become quite common for him to withdraw for days without contact of any kind. And when he did emerge…” Deimos drummed the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other. “…it was best to keep out of his way. Some of the staff may have begun to suspect by now, but most are quite content within the confines of their duties.”

“No one’s the least bit curious where he’s been for the last year?”

“I am.” Deimos spared her a brief, yet intense glance. “But no. We are not, as a rule, overly imbued with curiosity. I confess, although I suspected his absence soon upon my return to Haven, I was loathe to make inquiries. No matter how well our lord’s other companions have been kept, I am not confident of their loyalty.”

“Yeah, that’s not the sort of thing you want getting out after the purge,” said Lan, disguising her alarm with a short laugh. “You’d have the rest of the living world on your doorstep in a day!”

“Not so many and not so soon, but yes, they’d come. And in the absence of orders to the contrary, we would be forced to kill them all to preserve Haven.” Deimos clasped his hands behind his back and sent a brooding scowl toward the window that would have done Azrael himself justice. “I am not at all certain the extermination of the living race can be avoided at this point, but I do not wish to set those events in motion without my lord’s approval.”

Lan bit back a few caustic remarks on the subject of compassion and the sanctity of life and said instead, “No one wants that.”

“No. So.” Deimos turned all the way around and looked at her. “Do you know where he is?”

Lan raised her eyebrows until they felt like they might lift right off her head. “Do I? How the hell would I? I’ve been in France! Why don’t you ask his new dolly?”

“He’s had none since you.” Deimos gave that an impatient moment to sink in, then said, “Think. Has he ever, during your…intimate hours…spoken of his past travels? Is there any place he might wish to revisit?”

“No,” Lan said dimly. None. None since her. “Not as such. I mean, he’s been everywhere, hasn’t he? And none of them were what anyone would call happy memories. I can’t think he’d want to go back to any of them.”

“And you? Have you ever expressed a desire to visit any particular place?”

“I…I don’t think so, but you don’t seriously think he came chasing after me, do you? No,” she answered herself, trying to squeeze a laugh out. “No, he’d have gone to Norwood if that were true.”

“Oh, he did,” Deimos said with convincing quiet. “I was among those who purged Norwood. I know how I left it. When I first realized he was missing, I went there first. The signs of his presence were unmistakable, but as to where he went afterwards, I’ve no idea. I don’t believe he was ‘chasing’ you, as you say. He must have known he would not find you in Norwood. Not alive, at any rate. But he did go and if he went there, he might have moved on in your memory. Where?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Think.”

“You keep saying that, but the answer isn’t going to change! I don’t know!”

Deimos stared her down for a moment, then said, “There are some within Haven who blame you, deservedly or not, for our present circumstance. The Children are gone. The hungering dead, who have been our greatest defense against the living, gone. And there are some who believe we are next on your list of things that should end. That you have half-convinced our lord of this and that is why he has abandoned us.”

“That’s not true! I would never—”

“Think well before you say ‘never,’ seeing as you already have. You are not the first ever to attempt to end the hungering dead. You succeeded only because you chose the most potent weapon—our lord’s will. And if it was in your mind to set his will against the rest of us, you might well succeed, as he certainly bears us no love.”

He paused, his expression shifting through a number of minute changes as he continued the conversation internally. At the end of it, with a strange, subdued intensity, he said, “I realize our very existence is a decision he regrets. We were an act of vengeance and we remain, not as his protectors or companions or even as his servants, but only out of his sense of obligation to a mistake he made in a moment’s temper. He regrets us and he has done so long before he knew you, but I…I do not feel like a mistake. Maybe only because I lack the capacity, I don’t know. I only know that…that it is not for me to question him, nor cause him to question himself, but if he wants us ended, he should end us, not leave us as Men leave their unwanted offspring in the woods.” He paused a second time to fight and finally master that inner storm of emotion as the faintest traces of it slipped through his unblinking eyes. Then he said, calmly, “Now I ask you again, if you have any idea of his whereabouts, to tell me.”

Lan spread her empty arms. “I’m sorry, Captain, I just don’t know what kind of help I can be. I didn’t even know he was…” Her arms lowered. “…gone.”

Deimos watched her closely while Lan thought a few things through. When she looked at him again, he was all attention.

“Is Serafina still around?” she asked.

He expelled a terse, unnecessary breath and said, “She’s been pressed into his service, tending his former consorts. She may not even know he’s gone yet.”

Lan dismissed that with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter. She knows where he is. Better get a van charged up too. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long drive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was more than just one long drive, it was two, with a quick sea-crossing in the middle that took them from Eastport across the Channel and well up the coast, where they landed under the cover of night in an abandoned portside town. From there, it was inland, moving steadily east and then south, the three of them in a ferry he had taken from the palace stables. It had a winking woman painted on the side, standing tall in a mere suggestion of clothes over a few fallen Eaters. Now that she could read, she even knew its name: Dinah Might. Lan asked no questions as to how Haven had acquired it. Deimos drove, looking handsomer than ever out of uniform in the worn, flashy clothes that ferrymen favored. He said they were inconspicuous and maybe they were, but he drew eyes everywhere they went anyway. Him and Serafina both, who was equally ‘inconspicuous’ and sullen about it. Lan had grown accustomed over the past year to turning heads herself, but in the company of the beautiful dead, she was once more invisible. She was amused and a bit annoyed to learn it made her a little jealous.

They left France, left Switzerland, left whatever came after, going through places Lan didn’t know the names of. When she finally managed to convince him of the need, Deimos took it upon himself to do the negotiating at the waystations where they stopped, bartering goods from Haven to keep the ferry charged and Lan fed. He had no concept of a coin’s worth and no interest in acquiring one. In a village whose name Lan could not pronounce without at least two more vowels, Deimos poured the entire sum of the wealth they had collected, almost fifty ‘slip, into an old man’s hand and came away with the dubious prize of three sturdy bicycles.

“We going on a cycling holiday?” Lan asked as she helped him load them into the back of the van.

“They tell me we’re near the end of the road,” he replied. “The ferry will be no use to us beyond that point. Do you know how to ride?”

“It’s been a few years, but yeah. Do you?”

“Of course. They’re more convenient and easier to maintain than motorized vehicles.”

She tried to imagine him cycling through the empty streets of Haven and simply couldn’t.

He smiled thinly. “Yes, we don’t do it near the palace and never outside the city. We are aware that we look silly and that can only provoke the living to attack.”

“These are street bikes, you know,” Lan said, running a critical eye over them. “They won’t take rough terrain for long.”

“They won’t have to,” Serafina called. “If he’s here to be found, we’ll find him before the end of the day.”

“We’re that close?” Lan twisted around to look at Serafina, who was leaned up against the town’s open gate, staring out at the world beyond. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I mean sure.”

“Dead sure,” Serafina said flatly.

Lan rolled her eyes. “You’ve been saying all this time you don’t know where you are—”

“—but that I would know it when I saw it,” Serafina finished.

Lan joined her at the gate to have another look at the same thorny brush and blackened slabs of bare earth they’d been driving through all day. “Yeah? So what am I looking at?”

“This used to be forest.”

Lan shrugged, unconvinced but unable to see the significance in any case. “So?”

“So, it’s been burnt away.”

Lan shrugged again, irritably this time. “There were a lot of fires, back in the day.”

“Not like this.” Serafina glanced at her, then heaved one of her entirely unnecessary sighs and went back to the ferry, beckoning impatiently for Lan to follow. Letting herself into the back, she opened the hatch and climbed out onto the roof, stepping aside so Lan could do the same. This new vantage showed her only a little more of the world and it was all the same, but Serafina scanned it intently, oblivious to the young men of the village who suddenly found business close to the charging station where a casual glance upward might accidentally afford one a glimpse of the forbidden country beneath the dead woman’s windblown skirt.

“Um,” said Lan meaningfully, keeping her own legs tight together even though she was in jeans.

Serafina glanced down and tossed her hair. “Captain,” she said tersely.

Deimos uttered a sigh of his own and left off tying down the bicycles to pull his sword out from beneath the blanket that covered their dwindling supplies.

“Don’t kill anyone!” Lan exclaimed and whether it was her words or the very real weapon, the charging station quickly emptied. “Do we have to keep having this conversation? You know, for a guy so concerned with not drawing attention—”

“Oh, be quiet!” Serafina snapped. “And look.”

“Where?” asked Lan.

“Anywhere.”

Lan looked and, although she didn’t know much about fire except how to start one and not to touch it, she had to admit there was an eerie completeness to the devastation she saw here. Not a single burnt stump stood to mark where the old forest had been and no new trees had sprung up as a promise of a fresh start. Not a single stone wall or electrical tower had survived the fire. Even the road they’d been following all day was little more than chunks of asphalt scattered like breadcrumbs through the stony hills. There weren’t any road signs left over from the days when there was traffic or the husks of dead cars pushed off to one side…there was nothing.

Now that she saw it, it was really was everywhere: there was no livestock in this village and no grass where they could have grazed, only a scattering of shallow-rooted thorns over gritty soil. There were no crops growing in the open, Eater-less stretches surrounding the village. The people who made their homes in this dead land were just as hard, most of them as young as Lan or younger, grown old well ahead of their years—survivors.

“This was the fire you told me about,” Lan realized. “The one that fell from the sky.”

“Fell.” Serafina gave her a scornful, stabbing glance. “Like rain or snow, is that it? It just fell.”

Awkwardly, Lan went back to staring at the landscape. “I didn’t know…I thought they just dropped a bomb on the cave…”

“They must have wanted to be sure.” Serafina’s smile was sharp enough to cut, but she was the only one hurt. She looked away. “One would think they would have already learned by then how pointless it is to kill the dead.”

“Yeah, but back then, it was new. They saw him raise the dead and make them walk around again. They had every right in the world to be frightened.”

“Frightened? You think they acted out of fear? And what would you know about it, warmblood? Were you there?” Serafina glared at her, but the heat faded from her eyes when she looked back out over the mountains. “I was. Up there…somewhere…I was born again. In that beautiful place, the one they gave him to raise his Children. It was no palace. I don’t know what it was when the living used it, and I know they meant it to be a prison when they set him in it, but it was still a beautiful place. There, I opened my eyes for the first time and saw him over me…his eyes, burning behind his mask…and I was frightened. I did not have a voice yet or thoughts or purpose, but I had fear…and then he lifted me and set me on my feet and I saw the beautiful place surrounding me…and I saw my mistress…and she was beautiful, too. I knew that I was hers and this was home and all the world was beauty. And I was so happy.”

Serafina was quiet a moment, lost in the mountains. When she spoke again, her voice was hard and cold. “Until you warmblood bastards lured him out with promises of talk. And when he was gone, you crept in like cowards and opened your guns on his newborn Children. They did not know pain until that moment. They did not know to run. They only stood, crying out for one another, reaching out their hands—” Serafina’s own rose and limply fell again. “—as their flesh was torn away by your bullets. I remember the sounds…blood like rain on the tiles…bones cracking beneath boots…and their little voices, like kittens, really. Crying.” She closed her eyes, as if to listen better. “Crying as they were broken open, thrashing in the mess of their own cold blood, their splintered bones, their brains. They could no longer stand and never knew to fight, but they cried. They were still crying when he returned, trying to crawl to him on their broken limbs. If I slept, I think I should dream of that,” Serafina said, expressionless. “If I dreamed of it, I think I should wake screaming.”

Deimos grunted, the only sign that he was listening at all, and returned to the rear end of the van to finish securing their cargo and supplies.

“He could have mended them,” Serafina said, opening her eyes. “But there wasn’t time. He could not even stop to comfort them. He had to end them, these Children he had known only hours, and gather the rest of them to run. He led us through the smoke and the soldiers into the open world we had not even known existed and from there, into the wild places. We thought we had escaped them, but of course, we never had. They were chasing us before we had even begun to run. They were only waiting for us to stop moving, so they knew what part of the sky to burn. But I suppose you had to do it.” She looked at Lan and said softly, viciously, “Because we were monsters.”

“They thought they were defending themselves,” Lan said, but the words were sour in her mouth.

“From what?” Serafina demanded. “The hungering dead came after. Whatever had we done to provoke them? What did they think we were going to do?” Her eyes narrowed. “And who gave them the idea we were going to do it?”

Lan’s mouth worked in awkward silence, unwilling to give voice to the only honest answer—that the living had these films, you see, and that everyone knew the dead ate the living because the films said so. Mostly she wanted to say she hadn’t even been born yet, that her mother had only been a child, so please don’t ask her to explain it any better than that, because there was no excuse. Even the people who’d had to live through it back when it was happening just had to have known…they were only movies.

“So don’t look at me like that,” Serafina said with a sniff, nudging past Lan to go back down through the hatch into the ferry’s hold. “They deserved everything they got.”

Deimos finished securing the bicycles and slammed the rear doors with a silencing bang. As Lan stood staring out at the ruins of the world, he walked calmly around to unplug the charger. “None of that matters now. We have only three hours of power and four hours of light. Please do not waste time.”

Lan knew what he was saying and a part of her agreed, but none of it mattered? This place, whatever it used to be, was gone. Its people were orphaned, refugees in their own country. The earth was soured. The whole sky was stained that ugly color and maybe there was no point going on about it, maybe they were even to blame, but it still mattered!

Deimos looked up at her as he opened the driver’s door and put one hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I am a Revenant and we are not given to be sentimental. Whatever happened, it is done and cannot be changed by arguing over who was at greater fault.”

“The living,” Serafina muttered from within. “Theirs is the only fault. Where do you think he even got the idea for the Eaters?”

“The past is dead,” Deimos said, pointedly ignoring her. “The future may yet be changed. Remember why we are here.”

He was right, damn him. Scowling, Lan climbed down into the ferry and took her seat, pressed uncomfortably close against Serafina’s side.

Deimos gave the two of them a long stare and then started up the engine. The ferry rolled forward.

“And if it weren’t for you specifically, we’d all be back in Haven,” Serafina said. “The hungering dead would still be keeping the living at bay, so the siege wouldn’t have happened and our lord wouldn’t have ordered the purge, so you can blame yourself personally for the tens of thousands of lives lost in that pointless enterprise as well.”

Deimos slammed his boot on the brakes, throwing both of them forward onto the dashboard. He said, softly and while staring straight ahead, “I swear upon our lord’s glorious name, if you do not shut the bleating hole in your face, I will plug it with a pike.”

Serafina clamped her lips together and folded her arms, her long fingers digging like talons into her own flawless flesh.

Deimos drew in a deep breath, seemingly just to let it out, since he did not speak again. He took them out of the village through the unattended gate and put them back on the road.

It was not a long drive, although it certainly felt like one after that. No one spoke, and with the only sound being the road whining beneath them and wind buffeting the van, the morning seemed to last forever. Every time Lan checked the sun, she expected to see it sinking toward dusk and every time, she was surprised to see it not even at high noon yet.

When Deimos said they were near the end of the road, Lan had pictured it narrowing away to nothing. After all, it had practically been swallowed up already and its condition, such as it was, had deteriorated dramatically since leaving the last village. For the last interminable hour, they had been driving along what might as well be cobblestones, overgrown with creepers that perfectly hid the millions of axle-killing potholes full of rancid water and slime. At the first wide hole, Deimos had gone right through, cracking the fender on the broken asphalt and nearly miring a tire in the half-foot of sludge hiding under that innocent inch of water disguising its true depth. At the next one, he’d gone around, but the terrain was so uneven, Lan had been certain the ferry would go over on its side, no matter how slow and careful he was.

So it was almost a relief when the road did end, even if she still had misgivings about the bicycles. And the way it ended did a fair of job of livening the tedium of a drive with two dead people and the same bleak scenery on every side—burnt mountains, burnt rocks and burnt sky. The hills had been growing taller and craggier all morning, pushing the road that snaked between them into wider curves and steeper slopes. She could look out one window and see for miles, look out the other and see a sheer rock face. In this way, she saw the wall coming, as glimpses of color between all this grey and black, but never long enough to know what she was seeing, not until they rounded the last corner and were there.

Lan had seen a lot of walls like this one—cinderblocks, slapped up fast but solid, with razor wire all along the top. There had been a watchtower once, the sort with narrow windows that men could shoot through without exposing themselves to retaliatory fire, but it had been pulled down and salvaged to its metal bones. Likewise, the checkpoint station where guards who still didn’t understand what they were defending themselves from had once turned aside or gunned down droves of panicky civilians who still thought there was somewhere safe. There had been a gate once, but toward the end, it had been bricked up, leaving only this wall to slowly transform from military barrier to public forum. Even here, in the middle of nowhere—probably even while the ground was still smoking and the air too thick to breathe without masks—people had come, because people always believed there would be someplace untouched just a little further down the road. They’d come, not knowing this was where the whole thing started.

Signs had been posted at regular intervals, but even the ones that weren’t too faded and riddled with bullets to be legible weren’t in English. Over the years, pilgrims had covered over most of these notices in layer upon layer of apocalyptic murals depicting Azrael and Eaters and demons riding skeletal horses that made far more impressive warnings than anything the signs themselves could have said. At one time, there must have been whole curtains of leaflets and banners too, but nothing of those remained but a couple million tattered corners stuck to the wall with ancient tacks. Graffiti in dozens of different languages whispered, pleaded, shouted and laughed—quasi-religious gibberish spewing angry and fearful rhetoric about broken seals and eating the body of Christ; social commentary that was either meant to be ironic or was just badly spelled, like U can sleep when your DEAD or The End is Nigel. Crowning these madhouse musings were thick black letters stretching across the full width of the road—all six lanes—someone had written, WHAT HAPPENED. Someone else had painted a T over the W, which Lan thought so perfect an answer that it was a very long time before she noticed Deimos had stopped the van and switched off the engine.

“Is this it?” Lan asked, opening her door to stand on the runner in an attempt to see over the wall. This showed her only a little more of burnt mountains she could already see, but just stretching her legs felt so good, she stayed there. There was a bit of a breeze as well, blowing her hair back and bringing her the outdoorsy smells of earth and char and rot. Not a good smell. When she stepped down and scraped her heel over the ground, she scratched away less than an inch of ashy soil before encountering what almost seemed to be a layer of black glass, metal and stone, all melted together. Not good ground. “We walk from here?”

“Ride,” Deimos corrected, opening the rear of the ferry. “Although I suspect we’ll be walking soon enough. How are your shoes?”

Lan lifted one of her feet and had a look at the sole of her boot. “Still good. The most I’ve been running lately is wine bottles across a crowded pub. They’re practically new.”

“And yours?”

“What difference does it make?” Serafina said sullenly. “I have no others.”

Deimos acknowledged that with a grunt and unloaded the bicycles. He changed out the batteries on their lamps, checked their chains, and made sure everything that took grease had some. Then he took his shirt off.

Lan started to avert her eyes, but they were drawn back against her will, not by his body, which was as perfectly sculpted as his face, but by the startling mark on his upper left bicep—a tattoo. Darla, it said, closed in a heart, and beneath that, in two linked ribbons, Ann and Twyla.

Deimos, wiping his hands on the shirt, noticed her staring. He glanced at his arm and said, without interest, “That was there when I was raised.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re dead now and so am I. It hardly matters.” He tossed the grease-stained shirt into the ferry and unbuckled his belt.

Lan found an interesting section of the wall to stare at while he changed out of his clothes and into his Revenant’s uniform. When he was done, he buckled on his sword-belt, finger-combed his hair, checked his reflection once in the side-mirror of the ferry, closed it up and turned around.

“Feel better?” Serafina asked dryly.

Ignoring her, he selected one of the bicycles and pushed it over to Lan. He started to turn away, then paused and turned slowly back. He glanced at Serafina, who was busy tying up her skirts so as not to risk them becoming entangled in the spokes of her wheels, then moved closer to Lan. Disturbingly close. Close enough that she should have felt his breath, if he breathed. He reached into his Revenant’s jacket and drew out a much-creased sheet of what appeared first to be paper, then plastic, but which she quickly realized was a photograph. An actual photograph, not a page from a magazine.

She took it, staring in wonder at the thing and only belatedly seeing the three smiling faces represented there. A woman and two blonde children, one hugging at her hip and the other too small to stand without help. All three were smiling, although in the case of the youngest, it might have been a yawn.

“I found this when I was raised,” Deimos said, frowning at the photo. “I don’t know why I keep it. I feel…nothing…when I look at it.”

“But you do look at it.”

“Yes. I do. I have even decided this one—” He tapped the older of the girls. “—is Ann. I have no reason to think so. She just…looks like an Ann to me.” He took it back and studied it, his perfect brow furrowed ever so slightly. “I don’t remember them. I don’t miss them. I don’t wonder about them. But sometimes, I look at them.” He folded it and tucked it away, impassively watching Serafina take her first clumsy loop around the ferry. “I suppose you find that encouraging, that it means I have not wholly forsaken my previous life.”

“Have you?”

He looked at her, almost but not quite smiling. “Do you believe in a plane of existence beyond this one?”

Lan felt her eyebrows climb. “What, you mean God? Like, Jesus and thou-shalt-not-bugger and all that?”

“Nothing so specific. Do you, Lan, believe in a soul? Do you believe it goes on after the physical body has died?”

She was horribly afraid she knew where this was going, but she said, “I guess so.”

And now he would ask if she thought he still had his, but to her surprise, he said, “Do you believe your soul existed before you were born into this physical plane?”

“I…never thought about it. Yeah, I guess I do.”

He nodded once—his soldierly nod, at odds with that strange smile—and leaned close to say, “Have you forsaken that life?”

She made a few sounds. None of them were words.

He waited.

“No, I…I don’t…” She lifted her arms and dropped them. “This is the only life I know.”

He turned back to watch Serafina’s increasingly confident circles around the ferry. “And this is the only life I know. That I embrace it does not invalidate the life that came before. Do you consider me a man?”

Just when she was beginning to think she could not be more unnerved.

“Like…a male? In a, uh, masculine…sexual sense or—?”

“A human.”

“Oh.” She rolled her eyes at herself and her ridiculous level of relief. “Yeah, sure.”

“There aren’t many of the living who would agree.” He watched Serafina take an inevitable spill over her handlebars, then said, “Nor many of the dead. We even call you ‘humans,’ as if we are not. I must admit, the more we are forced into contact with the living, even with such as you, the more we seem to want that divide between us. One would think, with billions dead, the world would be big enough for both of us…but I think there can never be peace.”

“Me, neither.”

“Yet, you came once again, seeking it.”

Lan tried to smile, but she was afraid the effect was more like a wince.

Deimos did not appear to be watching her, yet his eyes narrowed and not on behalf of Serafina, who had bent all the way over to check her bicycle for damage, helping her tied-off skirts ride even higher over her shapely thighs. “I thought not. Then why did you come, when you know you can do your people no good?”

“How much good did I do them in France? Or in Norwood?” She thought about it and laughed without much humor. “Or in Haven, for that matter? I tried to save the world once. I think we can all agree it didn’t work out. So now I’m here just for me.”

“And what do you want with our lord, should we find him?”

“Same as you. To have him back.”

He nodded once, acknowledging an answer he had clearly expected. “I suspect we have different motives, but I do believe you have his best interests at heart. I do not, as a rule, concern myself with our lord’s concubines, but I have found your company on this trip to be not disagreeable.” He gave her a sharp, steel-eyed glance. “You won’t tell anyone about the picture.”

It wasn’t exactly a request. Lan shook her head anyway.

Serafina pedaled by with her nose in the air. “If you two are quite finished chatting each other up, let’s go! I’m not waiting on you any longer!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lan walked her bicycle through the nearest hole in the wall—painted over to look like the flaming gates of Hell, with Azrael and an army of rotting corpses marching out of it—and stopped short to take in the full effect of the desolation on the other side: a broken grey line lying over slabs of jagged rock and tangles of thorny brush, with Serafina already picking herself out of another spill. She’d be tempted to indulge a little spark of spite, except that she knew she’d be eating asphalt herself before too long. The flimsy street bikes Deimos had procured wouldn’t last an hour on this rocky excuse for a road and, optimistically assuming she didn’t break a leg in one of her many anticipated falls, they’d be walking the rest of the way.

Lan pinched her eyes shut and rubbed them, as if that might help the view change. When she opened them again, the scenery was the same except for Deimos beside her.

“It won’t be easy going,” he observed.

“You have a real talent for understatement.”

He ran through an internal list of responses and came up with, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Lan said with a sigh, and pushed off.

* * *

The bicycles did better than Lan had thought, but ‘better’ was a relative term. Spokes bent, chains slipped and tires went flat. Deimos managed some small repairs at first, but he was only delaying the inevitable. When they were forced to leave the road and go overland, it was almost a relief to leave the troublesome things behind.

They came the last length on foot, racing the setting sun with Deimos going before them, clearing the thick tangle of thorns and foot-catching ivy with sweeps of his sword. The ground beneath was shiny, burnt stone, buckled in on itself in brittle folds and pockets. The thinner sheets broke under her weight, quickly cutting through the soles of her boots, so that she had to stop several times to wrap them in whatever she had to spare—her coat-sleeves, her overshirt, her belt.

At last they came to a deep depression, ringed all around with smaller hills and valleys, where jagged protrusions of stone pushed out like teeth in some great worm’s mouth, forming a shadowed grotto.

“This is the place,” said Serafina, looking sickly aside at an overgrown ledge where a little water still trickled, shining over black lines of scum in the shape of a waterfall and collecting in a shallow basin beneath—the little pool where she had combed Batuuli’s hair, the day the bombs fell that turned their forest to…this.

Now that she was looking, Lan could see some of the rock here had been cut and stacked, building up a low wall here or forming a bench there. It must have been peaceful once, with the sky overhead and the trees all around, not quite wild and not quite tamed.

“You said there was a cave,” said Lan.

Serafina pointed, but even with that help, Lan still didn’t see it right away. She’d been expecting something different—a neat half-circle set into the side of a cliff, maybe even with stairs leading up to it, since Azrael had surely been here long enough to carve out a few comforts. What she saw instead was a crack in the ground, long and alarmingly narrow, overhung with a fresh growth of thorny creepers, died down for the winter. Deimos headed toward it, but Lan caught his sleeve to stop him.

“Just me,” she said.

He frowned, but stepped aside, sheathing his sword and assuming a soldierly posture without looking like he was trying at all.

“It’s dark,” Serafina said. She had not moved, had not taken even one step down into the burned grotto. “And deep. There are many tunnels and winding ways that lead nowhere. It’s so dark. Really, you can’t imagine…the darkness.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that once. I should have brought a torch.” She swore idly, then gave Deimos a narrow, speculative stare and half a smile. “You, on the other hand, always come prepared, yeah?”

He gave her the other half of that smile and pulled a small torch from his inner jacket pocket. It wasn’t much bigger than a pencil, but it was bright enough to blind her when she pointed it at her face and flicked it on.

“You’re very stupid, you know,” Serafina said seriously.

“Yeah, I know,” said Lan, trying to rub the lightburns from her eyes.

“He doesn’t want to be found.”

“Nobody gets what they want all the time.” She started climbing down.

“You don’t even know he’s in there! Even if he is, it must be his will to remain! Why would he come back?”

“I came back, didn’t I?”

Serafina threw up her hands with a huff and turned away, muttering.

“Be careful,” Deimos said, eyeing the low-hanging sun. “If you are not emerged by dawn, I will endeavor to find you, but I only have the one light and I am unlikely to find you without it.”

And with those comforting words hanging in the evening air, Lan reached the mouth of the cave and went in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was dark, just as Serafina had said, dark like a living thing. The cave’s opening was steeply angled, more like a chimney than a tunnel, and yes, Azrael had made improvements on its design—the rougher surfaces had been smoothed down and handholds carved into the rock to make passage easier—but there was no way of knowing how recently these changes had been made.

Climbing down in this way, Lan could still see daylight, even if it didn’t much touch her, but once her feet hit the bottom, things changed in a hurry. The ground sloped away and the rock was low overhead, forming a throat that swallowed her utterly within a dozen paces. She walked crouched over with one hand up to protect her head, but eventually, the tunnel opened up. After that, her torch could not penetrate the breathing black, but only lie over it, never reaching as far as the floor, much less the ceiling. She felt her way along the tunnel wall when there was one and stumbled when there wasn’t. Nothing was flat or smooth or dry. The ceiling caught her head, the floor caught her feet, and everything felt like soap, if soap could turn to stone. It smelled of sour earth and soot and stagnant water, but more than anything, it stank of time. She hadn’t realized until that moment that time had a smell, or maybe it only did in places like this, where it had decayed.

How long she walked, she could not say, but at last, her questing fingers touched metal and took away a gritty powder. Rust, she thought, until she brought her hand into the light and saw ash instead. She turned the torch on it and looked again. The door was not flat, although it had been once. It bulged in the middle now, bulged where he’d held it against the flames. When she ducked through the opening into the chamber beyond, she could see the marks of his hands still, flakes of skin pressed into the metal when it had been softened by heat.

She turned around, raising the torch as high as she could and squinting into the dark beyond. It was not a large chamber and although her torch was a weak weapon against the black, she could see it all. There was more to see than she would have thought for a place so small. Stone tables and benches lined the walls, leaving only a narrow path from the door to a bed of dry grass and sticks. There were bowls and cups, scraps of leather, bracelets and necklaces, and dozens of other half-made and abandoned artifacts littered every surface. Anywhere there was a protrusion deep enough to hold them, candles had been set, their years of drippage forming frozen rivers and falls of wax. Burnt bones and ashes showed her where his fire had been; above it, someone had drawn figures on the wall—long, slender bodies painted in yellows, reds and browns danced together, held hands, embraced. At their center, looming huge and menacing, the ash-grey, white-eyed shape of Azrael stood alone and watched. It was an oddly familiar picture and after some puzzling, she realized she’d seen it before. Made with trees, half burnt and half bowed, and one chained stone, but the same picture for all that, in every way that mattered.

“Tehya drew that.”

Lan jumped, accidentally dropping her torch. The plastic cap broke when it hit the ground, but it stayed lit. She picked it up, swearing, and Azrael’s hand swept in and took it from her. He raised it high, shining its diminished light over the wall, studying each small shape.

“Tehya was the only one of my Children who created,” he said. “I never tired of watching her. She could spin whole worlds from her fingertips, using just a palmful of berry juice, a bit of sand. They almost seem to be moving, don’t they?”

Lan looked at the wall. The figures had no faces, no clothing, no hair. They were only arms and legs and, yes, movement. They seemed so simple, like something a child might draw, but even without features, they somehow managed to communicate feelings. And they should have been good feelings, to see them all holding each other, but the longer Lan looked at them, the harder it was to differentiate innocent joy from the contortions of grief.

“In Haven, I at last had the chance to give her real paints, the finest brushes, a whole room to be her studio. She never touched them. It had been, by then, eighty-three days.” He lowered the torch. “You should not be here.”

“Neither should you.”

“Hm. You are alone in that opinion. Which I don’t imagine dissuades you in the slightest.” He moved around her and away, taking the torch with him. He lit a candle with a flint striker, gazed into its flame a second or two, then lit another. Light grew, flickering and sickly. The stink of hot tallow began to overpower the other smells of this place. “How did you find me?”

“Serafina.”

“Ah.” He looked up, as though he could see through layers of rock to Serafina on the surface. “Your powers of persuasion have not lessened. I would have thought nothing short of my own command could have forced her to return to this place.”

“She didn’t think you’d be here, either.”

“No? Do not all monsters eventually return to their dens?” He continued to stand by the last bowl of wax for some time, contemplating each ancient furnishing, each sorry attempt at comfort, but when he came once more to the drawings on the wall, he turned away. “Is that what this has become?” he murmured, running one hand along the rough edge of a niche carved into the wall. “My durance…eroded by long years into my den.” His eye fell next on the torch on the table. He switched it off and brought it to her, saying, “I was carried here in chains half a millennia ago, after my last captors had exhausted their efforts to send me to hell by any other means. I would show you the pillar where they fixed me, but that chamber lies far from here and the passageways have become unstable.”

“I don’t need to see it. And neither do you.”

“No, child, I do not, for in memory, I am there still.” His gaze was drawn back to the paint on the wall. “I never should have left.”

“Azrael—”

“Spare me your sympathy,” he said sharply. “And spare a thought instead for the billions of lives lost to my ascension. The skies would yet be full of color and the Earth full of life. Your mother would have grown up never knowing the singular experience of severing a spine with an axe. There would be no Norwood and no simple folk there to starve year by year. They could have bought their peaches from shops all their indulgent lives and never guessed…” The bitterness died from his voice as he looked around the cave. “…what horrors lay beneath their feet.”

“You’re not horrible.”

“I am…and I am sick to my very soul by it. I did not want this, Lan!” he said suddenly, no louder, but with a rawness that hurt her ears more than any of his roars. “I wanted nothing but an end to this deafening silence! I wanted companions in my solitude. I wanted a home.” His eye slid toward her and away. “I wanted you.”

She lifted her arms slightly and let them drop, unsure even as she did it whether it was a shrug or an aborted embrace or just an uncomfortable fidget in the face of his pain. “You can still have it. You can have me, anyway. It’s a start.”

He turned away from her. “Leave me, Lan. There must be one man left alive in the world. Go to your Adam and make your Eden before the last days fall. Have children.” He leaned one arm against the cave wall, his voice dropping to nearly a whisper, all but swallowed by the rock. “You would make such beautiful children.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she sighed, pressing the heel of her hand into her eyes to keep from rolling them. “Don’t do this. Let’s just go, huh? I don’t want kids and I don’t even know anyone named Adam. I came here for you.” Lan gave up on words and went to him. He turned away, his body stiff under her hand as she put her arms stubbornly around him and pressed herself to his unyielding back. The damp of the cave made his flesh feel even more chill and awful. She held him anyway. “I want you.”

He pulled her hands off him. “Go, Lan. There is nothing for you here. Just go.”

“I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”

“There’s a familiar tune.”

“Yeah? I meant it then and I mean it now. Look at me.” When he didn’t move, she grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. He allowed it and he allowed her to grip his face between her hands and pull him down into her angry kiss, but he did not respond. He didn’t even dim his eyes; she could feel the heat of his steady gaze as he waited her out and at last, she broke it off and bounced her fist off his chest. “I think about you every day, you ass! I lie awake at night, remembering just…the stupidest stuff! The things you said…things I thought I’d forgotten…things that don’t even matter. I wake up at night thinking I was dreaming about you…and sometimes I cry, because I can’t remember my dreams…and it’s like I’m losing pieces of you, pieces I never even really had.”

“I would have given you all. You made another choice.”

“Yeah, I did. I had to do what I thought was right. I walked away and after everything I’ve ever had to do, that was the only time I ever felt like I sacrificed something.” Her voice cracked. She looked up at him through a shine of tears and shook her head. “I mean…sacrificed. Like the old Picts with their stones. It cut me open. It bled.” She shoved him back with a sudden surge of furious strength. “I loved you, you son of a bitch! And I begged you not to make me choose!”

“So you did.” He turned away and seated himself on one of the benches crowding the cave, rubbing at his scarred face. “What masochistic whim was that? I knew full well how you would fall. And I know I could have as easily gifted you my hungering dead in return for your promise to remain as my consort. You would have readily agreed to such a bargain at any point from the very first hour you ever stood before me. In your eyes that night, I saw whole flights of ready promises, if only…” His hand dropped. He looked up at her. “Were you tempted? Even a little? ‘Say you were,’ you told me, ‘just so I don’t feel like so much of a fool.’ So. Were you?”

“It was the world, Azrael. It was the whole world. What was I supposed to do?”

“Just what you did.”

“You could have called me back.”

“You could have refused to go.” One side of his mouth twisted in a bleak, humorless smile. “You could have stayed to see Haven besieged. You could have seen me order the purge. Hundreds slaughtered, thousands uprooted, every settlement emptied…it’s the sort of thing that really demands a witness.” He paused, his smile—if it could be called that—fading. “Did you see it? Did you see your home…broken?”

“It wasn’t my home anymore.” Lan sighed and sat down beside him. “And no. I left ahead of the tide.”

“The tide, you say. You went to sea?”

“Sort of. Just across the Channel.”

“And from there?”

She shrugged. “Back here.”

“Ah, Lan.” He leaned back, shaking his head. “You might have seen mountains, jungles, canyons…there are still good places left, or so you once claimed. Instead, you settled in another Norwood and taught yourself to fish. You disappoint me.”

“I pulled pints, actually. And I didn’t settle there, I just passed the time.” She glanced at him and bumped her shoulder against his side. “I always knew I’d come back to you.”

“I would not have thought I agreed,” he said after a moment. “An hour ago, I believed myself resigned never more to see another face, let alone yours. Yet I am distinctly unsurprised to see you again.”

She chose to take that as encouragement and never mind the flat, scowling way he said it. “I came to bring you back,” she said.

“Back to what? The dream of Haven is ended. The world—” He swept his arm through the air, making candles gutter and throwing shadows huge across the cave wall as he pointed at the nothing all around them. “—is ended! If I cannot end with it, at least let me pass out of mortal memory. Let me be.”

“You can’t stay here, Azrael.”

“I can. Moreover, I should. I can never undo the damage I have done, but I can hide myself away until, in my absence, Men come to believe one of their kind has slain me. As the years pass, his deeds shall become legend while mine diminish. In time, I will once again be nameless, save as his nemesis.” His mouth made a smile that touched no other part of him. “I may not be the only beast this Beowolf of future telling bests, nor even the worst of them.”

“And that’s it, is it? I seem to remember someone who looked a lot like you telling me how you had an obligation to protect the people you raised up and now you just throw them to the wolves?”

Azrael went back to staring at the wall. “I trust Deimos to do what is best for Haven.”

“Really? Because Deimos brought me here to look for you. What he thinks is best for Haven is to have you back in it, because Deimos knows, even if you don’t want to admit it, that having you hide halfway around the world is only going to make things worse. And since we’re on the subject,” she added, letting her temper take her gently by the hand, “I think it was awfully bloody low of you to run off when everybody’s back was turned. If you really thought coming here was the right thing to do, you’d have put Deimos on the throne in front of your whole bloody court and then walked out the front door. So don’t you sit there and give me this golden flood of horsepiss about heroes and legends and future wolves. You knew what this was when you knew you’d have to sneak out to do it.”

He did not reply.

“Hiding is not the answer. And hiding here…” Her eyes swept the cave—Tehya’s pictures, his filthy bed, the blackened marks of his hands burnt into the door—and came back to him. “You’d think after all the time you’ve been alive, you’d have learned by now that you can’t fix anything by hurting yourself.”

He glanced at her, then raised his hand and brushed the backs of his knuckles along the scar on her neck.

“This is not about me,” she said tightly.

“Do as I say, not as I do.” He looked away, smiling. “I have missed your unique style of diplomacy.”

“Of all the things you could be missing…”

“I did not say I missed it most of all.”

“But, like peaches, you noticed the lack.”

“Yes.” His eyes dimmed and his voice roughened. “Like peaches.”

Her frustration did not disappear, but she was able, with a little effort, to put it aside for the moment. She put her hand over his. He let her, but as the minutes passed, each one a little longer than the one before, he made no move to hold it or to invite any other touches. Even as she felt his flesh cold and inhuman against her side, he was far away and he seemed to want to stay there.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I realize it’s too late now, but I’m…so damn sorry. You told me exactly how it would go and you were right. I thought I was saving the world.” She laughed a bit without feeling it at all. “I thought the world was worth saving.”

“It is.” The cave had a way of muffling sound, but his voice in those two words was all edges, a scrape across her ears.

“I believed that once. I must have, to have gone and done what I did, but now…now I don’t even remember what that felt like. It all went so wrong!” she burst out, flinging up her empty hands just to slap them on her thighs. “I got everything I asked for, everything I went there to get…and now I’m not just sorry I did it, I’m ashamed.”

Some of the stiffness went out of his body. He looked at her, his eyes barely lit at all.

“I should have chose you. But as much as I hate myself for what I did, there’s always some stupid little part of me that thinks it really could be better now. We can pick ourselves up, bury our dead and build it all back again. Hope.” She all but spat the word. “I loved you. That was real. I loved you and I traded it for hope.”

“That precious light,” he murmured. “The light that glowed out so fiercely, even I felt it once.”

“Did you ever love me?”

“I had to.” He rose with half a laugh, half a snarl, to pace as far away as the little room would let him go. “Against all reason. Such was the power of that pure, white light.”

“Did you stop?”

He was silent a long time, turned away, watching his own shadow flicker on the wall while he stood motionless. At last: “No.”

“Then what are we still doing here? Come back with me!”

“How can you ask? How can you wish me upon this world, knowing what I have done to it? In thirty years, I have undone all that Man has created in one hundred thousand years of his dominion! I have crushed all that I ever sought to hold, destroyed all that I have ever coveted and ruined this Earth beyond all rebuilding! Am I not Death? Am I not the very body of Evil? What…” He swung around, his arms outflung and all his heart bared to her. “For the love of God, woman, what do you want with me?”

She got up. His arms lowered, but not far; he held them out, held them open, as she went and pressed herself close to the cool slab of his chest. “Just this,” she whispered, listening to the deep, unnatural workings of his heart. “Sorry it’s not more noble, but it’s all I want and if you really won’t come back, well, I guess I have to stay.”

He groaned her name, but his arms closed around her. “No,” he said, holding her. “No, I won’t keep you in a grave.”

“And I won’t leave you alone in one. So there.”

“I’ll carry you out,” he said, but he didn’t. His claws passed once through her unbrushed hair and then he rested his chin atop the crown of her head. “I’ll command Deimos to take you away and never return.”

“I’ll come back without him,” she warned and laughed through the threat of tears. “Have you even met me? I’ll be back in this room before you are. Is that really the bed you want to lay me down in?”

His head turned to look at it.

She waited.

“Damn you,” he said and sighed. “So be it. Take me home.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It took all night to get back to the wall, since they had to pick their way over blackened, uneven terrain. Lan gave up the last pieces of her jacket and half her shirt to wrap her boots, but they were full of blood before they were an hour gone. She did not complain; Serafina’s shoes had already been cut away by the sharp rock and Azrael’s naked feet were open to the bone. When the time came to tear her trouser legs off, she offered to share out the fabric, but Azrael declined. His was the power to mend dead flesh, he reminded her, and as for his own wounds…he’d live. Lan argued, but not very long, and limped on with her feet padded as best she could manage.

As morning colors of yellowish-grey stained the sky, they arrived, only to find the van’s bonnet up and all that remained of their supplies gone. Deimos set off at once on foot, gloved hand already on the hilt of his sword, to address the theft and acquire new transportation. While they waited, Azrael called Serafina to him and began to mend her feet. Under his careful fingers, scored bone smoothed, torn muscle wove itself whole, and flesh as pliable as wet clay came together without scarring. Lan watched for a while, but the sight made her queasy, so she crawled into the back of the van and fell asleep.

She did not wake until Deimos came back in an old tub-cart pulled by a plodding mule with a skeletal deerhound straggling along after, hunched but hopeful-looking. He brought with him a fresh battery and tires for the van, several bottles of water, a large pot of dubious stew and a pair of boots for Lan. The boots were stiff with blood in places and everything smelled strongly of smoke, that particular smoky smell that comes not from burning wood or even meat, but cloth and hair and mortar as well. Lan put on the boots, drank the water, shared the stew with the dog, and then went back to sleep so they’d have an excuse not to have to drive through the village again until it was too dark to see it.

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.

“I’m sure I’ll be better in the morning,” Lan said, heading for the bed. “You can go.”

“At least let me plait your hair or it’ll dry in knots.”

“It’ll give you something to complain about tomorrow. Go on.”

Serafina muttered her way to the door, but then only stood with her hand on the latch, looking back.

“My bloody hair is fine!” Lan snapped, then realized Serafina’s gaze was focused beyond her, at the room itself. Batuuli’s room.

“Such a mess,” Serafina said softly, wistfully. “She would have had me flayed for allowing this to happen. She really was the sun, you know. She was the light of all lights, as terrible as she was beautiful.”

Lan fought with it as long as she could. “No, she wasn’t,” she said at the end of it. “He just made you think she was.”

Serafina gave her a quizzical look. “You say that like you think it ought to make a difference to me. When you think of all the people Lord Azrael has killed, does that make a difference to you?” She waited for an answer. There was none, so she said, “Your hair will be awful in the morning,” and let herself out.

Lan ran her fingers through her hair (nearly dry and, yes, starting to knot up) and went to bed. After sleeping in the ferry so many nights, it should have felt dangerously luxuriant, but it didn’t. Too tall, too firm, too empty. She lay awake for what felt like hours, tossing from one side to the other, punching her pillows and trying not to think too much about the dry forest of bones surrounding Haven and all the ways love did not reason.

* * *

She woke to a hand stroking up her leg under the sheets. It was a gentle touch and she was tired. If it had been a human hand, it might not have roused her, but it was his hand, cold and rough with scars, and her fresh-washed and lotioned skin was baby-sensitive. It was his hand…and his touch was welcome. Lan smiled without opening her eyes, content for the moment just to be petted, to feel herself shaped into a woman and brought to life, like in the old story about the statue and the pervy sculptor.

His hand reached the sensitive hollow at the back of her knee and withdrew. She heard the soft metallic clink and rustle as he undressed, and then the blanket was raised.

“You found me,” she said sleepily.

“And woke you,” he said after a pause.

“I’m a light sleeper. And I think I want to wake up for this. Please, continue.”

“With pleasure.” His hand returned to her leg, but in a distracted way. When she peeked up at him, she could see him gazing around at the white-and-gold walls of Batuuli’s bedroom. “I confess, I find the venue somewhat disturbing.”

“The Red Room didn’t have a bath,” she explained, rolling onto her back so she could see him bending over her, the light of his eyes glowing off her skin as he brushed his lips along the curve of her thigh. “But your room does, which is where I wanted to go in the first place. You sent me away.”

“An error I have been an hour seeking to amend.”

“Looked in the Red Room first, did you?” Lan indulged a peevish smile, thinking of all those stairs. “Serves you right.”

His claws pricked at her thigh, but she could hear a smile in his voice, not a warning, when he said, “You tease me at your peril, child.”

“Who says I’m teasing? I’ve been stuck in that van twice as long as you, remember? And before that, I walked to Norwood all the way from Eastport. I’m knackered. No, you don’t,” she said, catching at his wrist as he attempted to slide his hand up along the outside of her hip. She moved him where she wanted him most, arching back into the bed with his first obedient strokes. “Far,” she sighed, “far too tired to roll around with you tonight.”

He watched her move against his hand, his eyes blazing and dimming with the same rhythm she set. “I have missed you, my Lan.”

“How much?”

He tore the sheet away in a sudden snapping movement, unveiling her to an audience of just one, but his growl of appreciation ended on a disconcerted grunt. He touched her belly very gently, then her thigh, then leaned out and switched on the little lamp by Batuuli’s bedside.

“I got a little vigorous with the scrubbing,” she explained. “And I think I’m a bit sunburnt. It’s all right. It was a lot worse earlier.”

“My brave Lan…to have endured such hardship to win me back.” He reached for the sheet with a rueful sort of smile. “My passions can wait until you are healed. Abstinence, however long endured, is not fatal…and even if it were, I could not die of it. I am content to lie beside you.”

“Sure you are. That’s why you spent an hour looking for me, is it?”

“It is.”

“You’re a liar and so am I. Come here.” She kissed him, hooking an arm around his neck and pinning his mouth to hers aggressively until he grudgingly began to respond. “Take me back,” she whispered, biting and teasing at his broken lips. “Take me back, take it all away, take me, Azrael, take me right now!”

His hands were cautious at first as he caressed her very pink arms and shoulders, but it really didn’t hurt anymore and her little moans and shivers proved encouraging. His restraint dwindled as her responses became more urgent and when he bent to press his mouth where his hand had so expertly played, the little waves of pleasure he’d been coaxing into life became a surge of cramping heat. He caught her bucking hips, imprisoning her for the lash of his tongue, making pleasure into a weapon he could stab into her, stab and twist. Again and again, he brought her right to the edge, only to cut her on it. When he raised his head at last, she could only fall shaking into the sweat-drenched bed and watch as he rose over her.

There was no more foreplay to speak of, nor was it particularly missed. He drove into her and she pulled him in with equal passion, raking at his back with her blunt nails and hooking her ankles around his hips to hold him fast. There was no talk, only those silly, inelegant sounds lovers make at even the best of times: grunts and hisses and sighs and groans that grew in volume and in urgency until it was a wonder they didn’t bring the guards running in from the hall. The headboard rattled. The dust dropped off the curtains. The bloody lamp got kicked off the nightstand and smashed on the floor and none of it mattered. He came hard, filling her with fire, snarling into her mouth; she came screaming into his, writhing in exquisitely braided pain and pleasure as his heat cooled in her belly.

“Have you forgiven me?” he murmured, still lying heavily atop her, sharing her final shivers.

Lan nodded, catching his hand where he gripped her hip and guiding it to her breast. As he bent agreeably to suckle, his tongue flicking at her nipple between careful (and not so careful) kneading, she said, “Have you forgiven me?”

“No,” he growled and let her feel the sharp points of his teeth, only to burn away these little pains with slow passes of his scarred lips. “But I will. Ah, Lan. You bring out the very worst in me. This is not how I would have renewed our time together.”

“Felt fine to me,” she said after a short pause. “I mean, sure, you’re a bit rusty, but I wouldn’t say that was the worst you’ve ever been.”

He laughed and suddenly rolled, tumbling her over and around him to fall gasping against the very edge of the mattress. He held her down, there at the pivoting point of gravity, and pressed his mouth against the pounding vein in her throat, saying, “You have always been a terrible temptation. I came here tonight to sleep with you.”

“Mission accomplished,” she said breathlessly. “What now?”

“Now? Now I want you to sleep with me.”

“I can do that,” she said, holding out her arms.

He filled them at once, forcing her down into the rumpled blankets as he embraced her. His mouth closed golden on her breast, the very point of his tongue tracing intricate knots around her aching nipple. His scarred hands moved over her, not caressing as much as claiming, and she opened to it all, her body right at the edge of use and abuse, but still wanting more.

And then he covered her up again. He kept his hand on her, pinning the corner of the blanket to her shoulder as he kissed her, then settled himself beside her once more—his arm around her waist and the solid chill of his body pressed to hers, made tolerable only through the barrier of the blanket.

“You really meant sleep?” Lan asked, after a stunned second or three. Struggling up on her elbows, she caught his arm and gave it a hard shake. “You don’t sleep!”

“Very rarely,” he reminded her. “Seldom more than once a year.”

“And it has to be tonight?”

“Ah Lan, mercy!” he groaned. “I was making my bed ready when you found me. All this time since, I have been waiting, but the need has become intolerable. Why do you think I insisted that you rest the very instant we were back again within these walls? It was so I could rest!”

She wasn’t sure at first just what she was feeling. There were flashes of hurt—she’d only walked away the world to find him, after all, only had to beg him to come back—but what won out in the end was an echo of Azrael himself, saying what she said now, and in much the same smiling way: “You’ve never slept with anyone before, have you?”

“Never.” He reached out to brush his fingers along her shoulder and she let that feather-light touch lay her down again and bring him back against him. “And I confess I am not entirely at ease. But if…if we are moving on, my Lan, if there is any hope of that at all…I have to be with you tonight.” He frowned, eyes flickering. “I suspect it will be unpleasant.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I won’t ask you to stay with me all night. Just until I fall asleep. I’ll understand if you can’t touch me,” he told her, making an effort at a smile. “I’ll not blame you if you have to shift away, but if you can only bear to stay with me—”

“Don’t.” She put a hand to his mouth, pushing the offer back in before it could come all the way out. “Don’t sell it. Not to me, not to anyone. There’s always one piece you just don’t sell. Besides,” she said, now twining that arm around his neck and snuggling herself uncomfortably close, “I’m all done buying favors in your bed. I love you. Of course you can sleep with me.”

He rested a cautious hand on her hip and, when she didn’t throw it off, shifted her into the cradle of his arm, keeping the blanket between them. After a few tense minutes, she felt the strain begin to ease from his body. The light of his eyes faded, guttered, and died. Gradually, his breaths deepened and the terrible cold emanating from him thawed, as meat thaws, taking on the same dead temperature as the air in the room. If not for the wet, repulsive sound of his heart beating, it would have been like cuddling with a corpse, but she held him anyway, and when she did finally sleep, it was with him.

Not beside him. With him. And as unpleasant as it was (and it was. It really was), she was determined to believe that made it the best way to come home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Lan woke too early the next morning in the throes of a violent sick-up. She had apparently been doing it for some time; Azrael was already holding her shoulders, trying to lift her out of the mess since she was oddly incapable of doing that herself. Over and over, she vomited, long after her empty stomach had given up the last drops of bile and she wasn’t doing anything but ripping her throat apart on air. At last, it ended and she fell back against Azrael, limp as a wrung rag, and just breathed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, untangling her from the bedding. “Oh my Lan, forgive me. I should have left as soon as I awakened.”

She could only shake her head, pushing a weak, “Not your fault,” through her raw throat, but she wasn’t sure she believed it. To think of all the times he’d slipped away from her in the middle of the night and how she’d hated it, but this was what he’d spared her. Even as he lay her carefully on Batuuli’s settee, she was hanging her head off the side and sicking up again.

“Don’t try to move,” he told her and left, snatching up Lan’s discarded towel to wrap around his hips.

Move, the man said. Like that was an option. She hurt all over, not in the way of a sunburn, but more as if her body were one giant pulled muscle. Her head, ears and eyes throbbed, like she had a hangover without any of the fun of getting drunk. Worst of all was the taste in her mouth—like bile, batteries and rotten meat all mixed together.

She lay, shivering and sweating at the same time, with scarcely enough strength to keep from spilling to the floor, until the door opened again and Azrael returned with a small army of accompanying footsteps. The lights came on, stabbing into eyes she hadn’t realized were open. She managed to get her hands up to cover them, only to have the cold hands of the deadhead doctor pry them away again. Elsewhere in the room, servants quickly and wordlessly stripped the bed and mopped up the mess; Serafina was among them, her voice shrill as she admonished this or that one to be careful, this was Egyptian cotton or goose down or cashmere, but even as sick as she was, Lan knew the real reason was that it was all Batuuli’s and probably ruined now.

“Bit of a sunburn,” the doctor remarked, feeling at the pulse in Lan’s wrist.

Lan dragged her eyes open and looked down at her herself. The pinkness she had noticed in the bath the previous night had not faded much and actually looked worse in a broad band around her belly…where Azrael’s arm had rested in the night.

“That’s what Serafina told me,” Lan said dully, although she still couldn’t remember the sun being terrifically present during their travels. “I just thought the bathwater was too hot.”

“A hot bath, you say? And did you have anything to drink?”

“Uh…”

“Sunburns can be enormously dehydrating,” the doctor informed Azrael. “And it’s clear from her overall condition she’s been malnourished for some time to begin with. Her handmaiden should have washed her down with cool water, treated her with moisturizing lotions, and seen to it that she had plenty to drink if she was going to leave her unattended for the night.”

Serafina, pacing at the foot of the bed where other servants indifferently scrubbed at the bare mattress, belatedly realized she had come under attack and turned around.

The doctor bent Lan over her knees and felt up her back with hands that seemed to have been made of nettles. “Was the bed turned before she was put in it, by any chance?”

Serafina’s mouth dropped open and snapped shut. “It was…covered! It was all perfectly…perfectly suitable!”

“I see. Sunburn,” he declared, “exacerbated by allergens present in unkempt conditions.”

Serafina made a strangled huffing sound and punched her fists onto her hips.

“It isn’t serious, my lord,” the doctor went on, having a last peep down Lan’s gob. “She should be moved to cleaner surroundings and perhaps assigned a more attentive caretaker—”

“Quit taking shots at my handmaiden,” said Lan as Serafina sputtered. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“—but she’ll soon recover. See that she drinks often, clear fluids only, and if you must feed her, she’s to have soft foods in small portions. And, ah…rest. Rest, most of all. So if my lord were to find another, ah, outlet for his…that is to say, perhaps one of his other companions—”

“Balls to that!” Lan interrupted.

Azrael silenced her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I understand.”

“Good. Don’t hesitate to call on me if her condition changes to any degree, but do be aware that there’s likely to be some small cosmetic changes over the next few days. Peeling and so forth. Nothing to be alarmed over. Sunburns are rather unsightly,” he called as he headed off, “but entirely treatable and, I dare say, entirely preventable.”

Serafina followed him as far as the door, impotently outraged, then turned on Azrael. “My lord, I didn’t…! I would never…! She needed a bath!”

Lan roused herself to a reluctant sense of loyalty. “I did.”

Azrael stroked her hair, which hurt, then must have gestured because the servants stopped bustling around the bed and removed themselves. Serafina trailed them out, sniffing and muttering, and then they were alone.

“And I’m not sorry,” said Lan, reaching for his hand. “So don’t you dare apologize again.”

He allowed her to pull him down to sit beside her and brought her in under his arm. The chill of his body immediately soothed the stinging ache of her skin, a better balm than anything the doctor could have given her. She began to drowse again almost at once, despite her still-churning stomach.

“This is not the homecoming I would have wished,” he murmured.

“Maybe it’s for the best. I’m sure you’ve got lots of people waiting to see you.”

“I’m sure,” he agreed sourly. “One would think I’ve been away half the year with the amount of petty reports demanding my attention.”

“And if I weren’t so sick, I’d probably be jealous of you needing to spend all your time taking care of it instead of rolling around with me. See how it all works out?”

“Truly evidence of a greater design.” He stroked her hair some more. “Shall I have you moved to my chambers?”

She shook her head and the world swam. She grabbed at her temples, squeezing her eyes shut until she stabilized, and finally managed, “No. Not until I’m sure I won’t sick up in it. And not the Red Room. All those stairs.”

“Where, then?”

“Here is fine,” she mumbled without opening her eyes. “Here is just…just fine.”

He shifted her, pulling her into his arms and rising from the settee, but she was asleep before he could lay her down again in bed. She had only the faintest impression of the smell of clean sheets—such a uniquely Haveny smell—and then she was falling through it and into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

It was a bad day, alternately choking tea down and choking tea up, but those episodes became fewer as the hours dragged on and the sleep that interrupted them gradually became rest rather than simply unconsciousness. When night fell at last, she slept all the way through and woke feeling whole worlds better the next morning, as different from the Lan of yesterday as she was from the Lan of last year. At her request, Serafina brought porridge with her breakfast tea and when Lan was able to keep it down, more foods cautiously followed throughout the day.

Feeling recovered enough to get bored, Lan wandered Batuuli’s chambers during her alone hours, investigating empty drawers and cupboards, and when Serafina returned in the evening with her tray of tea, broth and two triangles of toast, optimistically buttered, Lan declared she was fit.

“You do look better,” Serafina allowed with a grudging nod. “Relatively. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, but you are very fortunate, you know, that our lord found you when he did or you might have actually become seriously ill.”

“He didn’t have to find me,” said Lan. “He was already here.”

Serafina paused, then rather too casually brought the tray over and set it on the table beside the bed. “What do you mean, already here?”

“I mean he spent the night with me. Part of it, anyway.”

“Here? You mean you…and he…in this bed?” Serafina looked at the bed in much the same way the knee-benders of Anglais-en-Port looked at their little chapel every time the town boys got a little too free with the wine and snuck in to draw boobs on all the Jesus-men—not just as something vandalized, but something desecrated.

“Sorry,” said Lan, not even a little sorry. “If it helps, it was fairly straightforward sex. Nothing oddjob. Unless you count a little Aussie kiss.”

“No, it doesn’t ‘help!’” Serafina snapped. “Eat your dinner! Or, if you feel up to it, our lord’s other companions are dining in the great hall?”

“Really? All together-like? I thought that was discouraged.”

“Things changed during the…the…” Serafina blinked several times, frowning, then occupied herself with setting up Lan’s cup and saucer. “The time that things changed.”

“The purge.” Lan took the pot before her handmaiden could pour something she wouldn’t even drink. “You can say it. If you could do it, you can say it.” And because that wasn’t fair and she knew it, even if she still at least sort of believed it, she forced a lighter tone to say, “So now we all eat together?”

“Mornings and evenings. Your days are still very much separate. Will you be joining them or…?”

“Is Azrael there?”

“He has been meeting with his advisors all day. He may attend, but I rather doubt it. He didn’t bother with breakfast.”

Lan sighed, but in truth, her hopes had not been high. The man had been gone a long time. If she saw him at all over the next few days, she ought to be grateful, but she reminded herself it wouldn’t last. He’d get his business sorted out and the dead would mire themselves comfortably in their new routines and all would be well in Haven. Until then—

“I’ll go to the dolly-party,” said Lan without enthusiasm. “Help me get dressed?”

Serafina went to the wardrobe and returned with one of her old gowns, a scratchy nightmare in a summery shade of yellow that Lan had always absolutely despised. It had that musty, unused odor of clothing that had been shut up and forgotten, but it wasn’t as if the mice had been at it or anything. She put it on, feeling very vaguely superior to the dead, who seemed to throw out any old togs that got the least bit torn or worn, only to discover that the smell got stronger as the fabric warmed against her skin and it really was intolerable after all. Maybe one of Azrael’s other dollies would be willing to lend her a dress until hers could all be aired.

Batuuli’s old dressing table was dusty, so Serafina had to stop and wash everything. Lan tried to help, got her hands slapped, which she accepted with good cheer, and thereafter stayed out of the way, drinking nasty tea and chatting while her handmaiden cleaned up. Then came the paints, which Lan promptly smudged by rubbing at her eye, ruining not only her made-up face, but her gloves as well. Her necklace was heavy and all over edges, but she couldn’t scratch at it. The lace of her sleeves tickled her arms, but she couldn’t scratch at that either. She had forgotten how much of being pretty meant sitting still and not touching anything.

It all took so much longer than she remembered. By the time Serafina declared her fit to be seen, she fully expected the meal to be over, but the doors of the dining room were open and Lan could hear the musicians playing. Even better, Azrael’s steward bustled importantly away as soon as he saw her, so there was a good chance she’d be seeing Azrael himself before too long.

So encouraged, Lan went on in, noting first how empty it was. Apart from the two pikeman guarding the door itself, there were none lining the walls the way Lan remembered, and only a few servants. Most of the tables had been removed, leaving just two on either side of the dais at the north end of the hall. Of course, it didn’t take more than two tables to seat Azrael’s dollies. There were only eight of them now, and the girl, who had sprouted up considerably after a year of sheltered rest and good feeding. But no, Lan saw with a start, there were nine after all. The flute-player was with the orchestra and not eating with the others.

The empty hall, with its tiled floors and paneled walls, had made itself a room of echoes; the other women could not have been unaware of her arrival, but they knew they were all themselves accounted for and the comings and goings of servants held no interest for them. The child spared her a glance, but her game of catapulting a cherry down the bodice of none other than Miss Mannerly-Buggery-Do proved more exciting than some new face in the hall. Lan had to walk past the orchestra before her presence registered as a sudden shrill note on a silvery flute.

All the musicians fell silent at once, allowing the flute-player’s voice to ring out uncontested: “You!”

Now they all looked up. Eyes went wide. Mouths dropped open.

Lan plucked at her skirt, which she supposed she would be stuck wearing until her new togs came after all. “So,” she said lamely, nodding at the dinner platters. “What’s good?”

The simple question sparked a small flurry of movement—not from the living, but from the dead. Attending servants scattered, two of them comically colliding in their hurry to fetch a chair and set Lan’s usual place at the imperial table, beside Azrael’s empty throne.

The other dollies watched with varying blends of amusement, envy and contempt, all their conversations gone to whispers and smirks. The red-head uttered a huffy sniff when Lan put her foot on the dais step, but Lan was willing to overlook it. Less easy to ignore was the cherry that sailed by her head, but even that was rendered forgivable by the whistle-and-yelp of a switch swapping the manners into an offending hand. Tempo, master of Azrael’s orchestra, tapped his little stick and started up the music again; the flute-player managed a few notes, then got up without a word and took herself and her flute away. Azrael’s dollygirls watched her go, then all looked back together and stared Lan down en masse.

If she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have left, but she was, so she stayed. The food was good, although very heavy—onion soup with bubbly cheese melted on it, roasted oysters, and soufflé cups followed by a course of fish in brown butter with veg or steamed mussels in wine, and now her choice of capon with cherries, braised beef with mushroom, sweetbreads sautéed with garlic, and everywhere crusty bread and cheeses and wine. Azrael’s doing, it had to be. Trying to make her feel at ‘home’. Like France was home. She’d ever eaten this fancy in Anglais-en-Port. High cuisine at Mal Henri’s meant onion and kidney pies, where it didn’t pay to think too hard about where the kidneys came from.

The hell with them. She didn’t come to dinner for the company, not theirs, anyway. Lan filled her cup and piled her plate high, ignoring her tender tummy’s apprehensive tightening. This was her first real meal in forever and she was determined not to let it be dampened by a bunch of jealous chavvies. She only wished Azrael were here.

And, as if her thought had flown out like a magic bird and summoned him, he walked in.

Stalked in, rather, banging the door open and slamming it in his steward’s face with a curse that could have soured milk, if there’d been a cow in the room. Then he turned, saw all his dollies in one room, and froze. The flames of his eyes leapt as his gaze darted from face to painted face, but if he was surprised, they were appalled. It seemed they were only happy to be jealous as long as they didn’t have to deal with the man whose affection they were all vying for.

“You’re late,” called Lan.

He looked at her, at the others, and at her again. After a moment, he thought to smile. “Unforgiveable. And so soon after your return. Regrettably, civil matters demanded my immediate attention.” Your return, he said. Not our. As far as his loyal subjects were concerned, he’d been here the whole time. He started toward her at a brisk pace, making short work of a long walk. “Yet well I know there is nothing so pressing that I should have kept you waiting. Or indeed, any of you. Good evening, Felicity. Autumn. Christina.”

His dollies fluttered as he named them. The red-head made as if to stand, but settled again, pretending her skirts had needed shifting. Necks bent. Hands found forks and cups to play with, but no one ate or drank. The child armed herself with a plum, then ate it, pulling the spray of flowers that fancied up the table between her and Azrael’s shadow when he passed by and peeping at him between the blooms. When he nodded at her, she waggled her fingers in a reluctant wave, then slithered out of her chair and under the table, where she stayed in spite of her etiquette tutor’s hissing.

“I see you’ve elected not to starve in my absence,” he remarked, as he ascended the dais. “I thought you did not attend dinners for the food.”

“I made an exception this once,” Lan told him. “Look, lemon cake!”

He accepted the slice she offered, but set it aside on his plate, studying her face. His voice lowered as conversations picked up again at the other tables, so that it was just for her that he said, “Should you be out of bed?”

“Oo.” She snuck a hand onto his thigh behind the shield of the tablecloth and tickled. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t be?”

He put his hand over hers, keeping it from further explorations. “You seem pale still.”

“Beats pink, don’t it?”

“Hm.”

“I’m better now.” She dropped him a wink. “Much better.”

At last, she got the smile she’d been fishing for, but it remained distracted, unconvinced.

“Something wrong?” she asked, tucking into her lemon cake. The taste was not what she remembered, less like angels fucking and more like angels groping. Maybe tongues were involved, but she was reasonably certain their hands were on top rather than underneath their angel-robes.

He didn’t answer, which was a bad sign until she looked at him and saw he genuinely seemed to be thinking that over. “No,” he said at last. And before she could question him further—about that lengthy pause, for example—he suddenly said, “Do you trust me, Lan?”

“Oh balls, what am I supposed to say to that?” She shook her head, not in answer, but in helpless wonder at her own lack of tact. But now it was out and there was nothing for it but to run with it. “Trust is one of those things, you know. If you have to ask someone to prove it, it only proves that you don’t trust the other bloke yourself, so it almost…It…What’s the word I want? Is there a word?”

“Undermines, perhaps. Diminishes. Hm.” He tapped at the edge of his plate with his thumbclaw, a familiar and much-missed sound. “You may be right. I withdraw the question.”

“Yeah, but now I have a couple.”

“The lights are going out.”

The statement seemed to have come from an entirely different conversation. Lan blinked at him, then looked up at the lamps set in the walls and ceiling, but they all burned as bright as ever.

“Not here,” he said. His claws drummed once beside his plate. “Not yet. But it is coming. The power stations require maintenance, the maintenance requires parts, the parts must be manufactured, the manufactory requires machinery, the machinery requires maintenance, and so it goes. What is to be done?”

“Let ‘em go out,” she replied with a shrug and had another bite of cake. “Candles are fine.”

He nodded as if this were just the response he expected, but not as if he agreed.

“You never liked them anyway,” she reminded him.

“No. I never have.”

“And there’s nothing you can do about it, after all.”

His eyes darkened as the shadow of his thoughts passed through him. He did not reply.

“Oh stop,” she said, determined to be only cheerfully exasperated with him tonight. “There’s nothing you can do! Even before the war was over, folk knew they’d never be able to keep the electric on. They were already running out of petrol and oil and all that, and with the power gone, they’d never be able to refine what they had left, so they put everything they had into solar charging stations and all that, but now what?  Sure, we can charge up the batteries, but it’s not like we can ever make new ones. Or tires or engine belts or any of that tinkery shit that makes up a car, so what was the point of it all? And now the docking stations themselves are starting to break down and who didn’t see that coming? What good is a solar charger when the panel cracks? No,” she said, giving his hand a comforting pat. “It’s all over, but life goes on, yeah?”

He turned his hand under hers and closed his fingers briefly around her, then opened them again. He still did not reply.

Lan’s appetite dwindled in his silence. She used her fork to catch up crumbs on her plate, only to tap them off again. “I really wish this wasn’t that important to you,” she said at last. “Because it’s ugly, Azrael. I love you, I do, but this is really…really ugly.”

He frowned behind his mask. “The lights?”

“Not the lights. The reason you want them on.” She couldn’t look at him anymore, so she looked at the lamps instead. “Because you know they’re the last. You want them seen. You want everyone who’s left to know what they lost and know you have it. The Land of the Beautiful Dead, land of electric lights and lemon cake.”

“Lan—”

“It’s ugly.” She shoved her chair back.

He touched her arm. He didn’t grab it. If he had, she might have yanked away, but he just touched it and after a long, tense moment, she pulled herself back to the table.

“They are the last,” he said, seeking and ultimately finding her reluctant gaze. “I do want them seen. For all the reasons you say, yes…but those days were past years ago. Now, I keep them lit because…because this is Haven and all the best that ever was in Man is here.” Now he looked at the lamps. “And I am not ready to see that light go out.”

‘Ready or not,’ she thought pragmatically, but her pudding heart went out to him all the same. “Is there anything you can do?”

His eyes flickered. “Perhaps.”

“But you don’t want to,” she guessed.

“The risk is enormous, the outcome…uncertain at best.” He beckoned a servant to bring him wine, but did not drink once he had it. He merely held the cup, brooding over his reflection. “It would be a lengthy and difficult endeavor, both here and beyond my borders.”

“How far beyond?”

“I don’t know.”

“That far, huh?” Lan pushed a bit of sausage around her plate, drawing pictures with the congealing grease, her appetite gone and nausea returned. “So…you don’t actually mean Haven’s borders when you say ‘beyond.’ You mean out in Britain somewhere.”

She waited, but he did not agree.

“Beyond Britain?”

He brought his hand up to rub first at his brows and then under his mask.

“So just to make sure I’ve got this right…” Lan set her fork down on the edge of her plate, dabbed her lips with her napkin, then folded her hands together before her on the table and pleasantly said, “You pushed everyone out, you killed everyone who wouldn’t go, you’ve killed everyone who ever came back, but all that wasn’t enough.”

“Lan…”

“I know you didn’t want to,” she said and could mean it. “The last thing I want to do tonight is throw it in your face, but you did what you did because you had to draw a hard line. And now you’re stepping over it. And for what? What makes you think you’re going to find better salvage on the continent than here? Is it really worth hitting the hornet’s nest just to keep the lights on?”

“It is not my intention to provoke the living. It is not my intention that they should ever know of this endeavor.” Now he glanced at her, just a tap and a flash of one eye. “Even I can be discreet at need.”

“I’m sure you can, but you’re not going, are you? You’re going to send your…” There was plenty more she wanted to say at that point, about his deadheads and their less-than-discreet attitude when it came to dealing with the living, but it all went out of her head when she saw his eyelight flicker deep in his stoic mask. “Are you going?” she pressed. “You’re not, are you?”

“Not…necessarily.” His thumbclaw scraped softly up and down the side of the cup. “My Revenants could oversee the—”

“Your Revenants? You can’t send Revenants!”

“Merely to defend those who were not imbued with the power to defend themselves. I trust them to obey my orders, even those that may conflict with their risen instincts.”

“Do you?” Lan fought her incredulity and lost. “I spent days in a ferry with Deimos! I know exactly what his instincts are. The first place we stopped to charge up, we didn’t have any ‘slip, so they tried to turn us away. We had a crate-load of goods to barter; Deimos pulled a sword. If I hadn’t been there, he would have tap-stabbed his way through the whole town and probably never even looted the corpses for ‘slip to pay at the next stop. That’s how a Revenant deals with problems. Oh, I’m sure they’ll follow your orders to the letter, but there aren’t enough letters in the world to cover every possibility, and the first unexpected thing that comes along, the instinct they’re going to fall back on is, ‘Hmm, how can I solve this with a sword?’”

“I acknowledge the fault.”

“But you’re ignoring what it means! You talk like this is about saving something, but you can’t do it like this! You can’t…You can’t kill people to memorialize their achievements!”

“That is not my intention. I say again, if all goes well, they would never even encounter the living.”

“When in the history of ever has all gone well? No,” said Lan, stabbing viciously at her last quarter of cake. “If your people need overseeing, then you need to do it, and if sooner is better than later, then that’s when, and if keeping the bloody lights on is really that important to you, then just go.” Giving up on the cake, she shoved it and the rest of her dinner aside. “How long is all this going to take?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t think I would be gone long. A month, at most.”

Lan nodded with what she considered admirable self-control. “Could I come with you at least?”

“No.”

“Sorry, my mistake, I said that wrong. What I meant to say was, I’m coming with you.”

“No, Lan, you are not.” His tone was never harsh, but it softened anyway as he said, “This is no small undertaking and it carries no small risk. I will not endanger your life to have your company.”

“Endanger my life,” she scoffed.

“And more than your life alone, perhaps.”

She rolled her eyes with spraining force and stabbed at her plate some more. “You know, if worse comes to worse and we do bump up against the living, having a warmblood along who can deal with them might actually save lives.”

“That is not what I mean and you know it.”

“What do you mean then?” she challenged. “Go on! Tell me what I know!”

He turned a cool stare on her that became gradually uncertain the longer he searched her face and did not find whatever he was looking for. “You’ve been ill,” he said at last, but there was a slight lift on the last word, almost making it a question.

“I got better!”

“Your first day risen from a fever is perhaps too soon to make me such an assurance.”

“I shouldn’t have to make you any assurances at all!”

“Lan, be reasonable.”

“Balls!”

“How come she gets to say it?” a child’s indignant voice wanted to know.

Reminded of their audience, Lan shut her trouble-making mouth and cut another slice of cake, even though she hadn’t yet finished the first. She didn’t eat it, just slapped it on her plate and glared at it, occasionally poking at it with a fork. The servants brought coffee, steaming hot, and all Lan’s favorite things. She made herself a cup, but didn’t get it quite right. The taste was bitter. She had only two swallows and put it aside.

Azrael wisely let her fume. Several minutes must have passed before he finally said, “You could talk me out of it. You can pluck me like a harp, you’ve proven that often enough in the past. But I should think you, of all people, would appreciate that mine is not a selfless nature and the opportunities to rise above it are rare. Shall you not give me your blessing?”

“You’re leaving me.”

“Briefly.”

“We just got back and you’re leaving me.”

“How can I mend this, Lan? Tell me how.”

“I’m going to have affairs while you’re gone.”

He raised his cup as if to drink, not quite quick enough to hide his smile. “With whom?”

That stumped her, but only for a second.

“Deimos.”

“Of all prospects,” he mused, looking annoyingly curious and not at all out of sorts. “Why Deimos?”

“He’s the only other man I know by name,” she admitted.

“Is that your only requirement? Truthfully?” His head tipped. “I’m not certain how to feel about that.”

Lan didn’t smile for him.

He sighed, setting his cup and his teasing tone aside. “I don’t want to leave you. Even for so short a time, I would never want to leave you. I do only what I must to preserve Haven.”

“And it has to be now? It has to be right now?”

“Yes. We’re moving on, Lan, and as I once heard someone say, I can’t move on if it means leaving everything the way it is, because that’s not moving on at all. That’s giving up.”

“I’m not going to stop you,” she muttered. “I said you could go.”

Azrael tipped his head back and spent several seconds loudly thinking over the idea of having her permission to do anything before he said, “Thank you.”

“But I have conditions.”

“Of course you do.” He moved his throne to face her full-on and laced his hands together over his stomach. “I will hear them, diplomat. Proceed.”

“First.” She stuck out her thumb. “You don’t leave me in the night. You do it right in front of me or not at all.”

“So agreed. Next?”

“Second.” Up went her finger. “You give me a few days first. I’m not ready to miss you yet.”

“I would not have it otherwise. It will take time to make arrangements, to assemble—”

“Third,” she interrupted, adding another finger to the count. “I don’t want to know the details. Where you’re going…how many Revenants you’re taking…” She shook her head hard. “If you thought I’d agree with any of that, you’d have already told me. You’ve been really careful not to say one word more than you had to and don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

He seemed about to speak several times, but in the end, he only nodded.

“Fourth. You promise me you’re doing this for the right reasons and you’ll do it the right way.”

“Done.”

“No,” she said sharply. “You say the words. You swear.”

“I swear. Upon my word. Upon my honor.” He shrugged. “I would swear upon my life if that had any meaning.”

“Then swear on mine.”

His eyes fell, like a flinch, to her neck and dimmed. After a long silence, he reached out his arm and lay his cool hand over the scar. He looked at her. “So sworn.”

Lan uncurled her last finger and held it up a moment before letting her hand drop to grip his wrist and grip it tight. “Don’t you leave me if it’s raining. You leave me on a nice day, you hear me?”

“It’s a trap,” he murmured, stroking his thumb along the curve of her jaw. “You’ll hold me here forever that way.”

“Promise,” she insisted. “Leave me in the sunshine and I can wait for you, thinking it’s not real and I’ll see you again any day. Any day. Don’t you leave me in the rain.”

“Done.” He dropped his hand, raised his cup, and saluted her with it. “You always get the best of me, negotiator.”

“It’s all I want.”

“Mm. The best of me…” His thumbclaw scraped along the side of his cup as he studied her, and then he set it again aside and rose. “Come to bed, Lan. It can’t rain all the time, even in this accursed country. I’ll give you all I can until it stops.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They did not talk about it after that and for a while, it was all right. Azrael gave her all the time he could, more than he had given her before and certainly more than he gave anyone else, but it still wasn’t enough. There they’d be—having dinner, walking on the lawn, even in bed—and some deadhead would come bowing up to tip a word in Azrael’s ear and off he’d go.

She couldn’t blame him. Well, she could, but she shouldn’t. It was no small thing to coordinate several hundred dead people for an open-ended departure, let alone trying to do it without her knowledge. That it was several hundred dead people she knew because from any front-facing second-floor window, she could see a caravan of ferries being assembled on the road just beyond the iron gates of the palace courtyard, each one carefully checked over, tuned up and even washed before it joined the ever-expanding queue. As for who would soon be filling those ferries, from the right westerly-facing second-floor window, she could see all the way into the garrison yard, where Deimos could regularly be seen drilling his Revenants.

And the rain fell.

Lan’s sunburn faded, but she was slow to recover from the other effects. Her stomach in particular remained annoyingly delicate for days after, especially in the early mornings, forcing Lan to find new and creative ways to be sick without anyone knowing about it, since Azrael had a tendency to treat her like an invalid and Serafina would only snipe at her for having warmblood dramatics. Much as she hated to admit it, she had a feeling Serafina was closer to the truth. The exhaustion and nausea haunting her came and went without cause. What else could it be but her fears and unhappiness about the situation finding its own way out of her?

But for the most part, she did not feel ill. She didn’t have much appetite, but she enjoyed taking her meals with Azrael again, even if he so often came late or left early or was interrupted in the middle to chat with Deimos out in the hall. He went walking with her nearly every day, out in the gardens or down to the river or even just around the palace to look at paintings and silly fluff like that, which was nice, as long as she could pretend he wasn’t doing it just to get her clear of the area where he was moving his deadheads in and out, putting everyone in their special place so that when the day came, they could all up and go with the least amount of fuss. And he took her to bed at night, where he could always make her feel as though time itself had stopped and nothing mattered to him but her, but then she’d wake up alone.

Until she woke instead to the sound of a quiet knock on the bedroom door.

She couldn’t have been asleep long; Azrael was still with her, his arm heavy and right-feeling around her waist and the blanket bunched up between them to spare her the unnatural cold of his flesh. He raised himself up to look at the door, then shifted away from her and eased one leg out over the edge of the bed. The mattress rocked. He froze, his probing stare warm on her bare back. When Lan sleepily cupped her palm before her face to catch his eyelight, he bent and brushed his rough mouth across her shoulder.

“It’s early,” he murmured. “Go to sleep.”

“Are you coming back?”

“I don’t know yet. If I can.”

“Who’d stop you?”

“Matters—”

“Demand your attention elsewhere,” she finished for him and blew out a rude sigh, snuggling deeper under the blanket. “Go on then. Chew your leg off and leave me.”

He kissed her again, his blunt claws just skimming the sensitive scar at her neck, and moved away from the bed. She listened to him find his clothes in the dark and dress, making no more noise than a rat running up a curtain. Then, more silence. His hand passed once, light as a breeze, along her hair and then he left her. She could hear his chamberlain’s voice out in the hall, too low to make out words, and the rumble of Azrael’s reply before the door closed them away.

Lan rolled over, staring at the door for what felt like an hour, but she already knew it wouldn’t open again. Not tonight. She got out of bed to pace for a while, giving her tummy a chance to decide if it wanted to be sick since it had the opportunity to do it in privacy (it did), and as soon as she’d buried the evidence in the chamberpot under a thick layer of ashes and a sprinkling of rosewater, she got back under the covers. She told herself the cold lump sitting in her stomach was just more sick working its way out the other end and not a premonition. He might not be back tonight, but she’d see him at breakfast, just the same as every day. She eventually convinced herself, but it was still some time before she found her way back to a thin and unhappy sleep.

The second time she woke up, it was to Serafina wanting to dress her for breakfast.

“I can’t,” Lan mumbled. “Go away.”

“And what shall I tell our lord when he wants to know why you haven’t seen fit to join him at the table?” Serafina demanded, yanking the blankets back.

Lan’s answer was to hang her head over the edge of the bed, pull the chamberpot over and yark up in it.

Serafina sighed and covered her back over.

Lan slept, but although Azrael’s chambers had no windows and no timepieces, she didn’t think it was very long before her handmaiden was back with a breakfast tray. She drank the coffee, ate a few bites of porridge and half a triangle of buttered toast, and then just stared at the rest. She should eat it. It would all go to Azrael’s pigs if she didn’t. Or out to the greenhouses as mulch. Or just down the pipes, wasted like her bathwater. Knowing that, Lan waited to feel some spark of shame sufficient enough to make her pick up her fork and clean her plate, but she didn’t.

This was what Haven had done to her, she thought morosely as Serafina dipped her in and out of the bath and wrapped her in a robe. If it could be said that Norwood’s hardships had pulled her from the earth and shaped her as a rough, muddy stone, then Haven’s luxuries should have smoothed and polished her. Instead, it had made her a spoiler of food and a fouler of water, just because she was pouting.

She didn’t feel like she was pouting. Well, all right, maybe a little pouty, but mostly, she felt sick.

Lan studied her face in the mirror as Serafina performed the usual post-bath rituals. She could see dark rings under her eyes and a sallow tone to her skin she was almost halfway certain hadn’t been there before. No, she’d never been a beauty and never would be, but she didn’t always used to look like this.

Suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone in the mirror. Deimos was standing in the doorway, his face white as bone in the darkness of the hall beyond.

Lan turned around, earning herself a swat from Serafina, but yes, he was still there and when he saw that he’d been seen, he took that for permission to enter and he didn’t come alone. Trotting along beside him was the damned deerhound they’d picked up on their return trip to Haven, possibly even mangier than it had been the last time she’d seen it, but nicely filled out. What was left of its fur was well-groomed and even its claws were trimmed.

“Absolutely not!” Serafina shrilled, pointing at the door. “That animal has no business in our lord’s bedchamber! Remove it at once!”

Lan felt a moment’s conflict. She didn’t like dogs in general and deerhounds in particular, but this dog had not spent the last half-hour exfoliating her with a pumice stone and Serafina had, so her loyalties shifted. “It’s okay,” she told the dog, reluctantly offering up her open palm to be first sniffed and then slobbered on. “I’m sure she says the same thing about me.”

“What are you…? What is it…? It’s dribbling on you! Captain, get that thing away from her immediately! Immediately, do you hear me? I won’t have dribbling in our lord’s chamber!”

“Phobos, fall in.”

The deerhound obeyed like it had been all its life in the Revenant guard and sat at its captain’s side, chest out and feet firmly planted, happily panting.

“You named it?” Lan asked, surreptitiously picking hairs off her robe with one hand while Serafina scrubbed the other one raw with a fingernail brush. “How long are you planning on keeping it?”

Deimos looked at the dog. The dog looked at Deimos.

“Well, I hope you’re feeding it,” said Lan, although she could see for herself it hadn’t missed many meals lately. “Dogs eat, you know.”

“There is nothing you can tell me about this animal’s digestive system I have not already discovered,” Deimos replied grimly. “Are you well?”

“She’s fine,” said Serafina, finishing the sterilization process of Lan’s hand and resuming the attack on her cuticles. “She’s just sulking.”

“I am not.”

“Not well?” Deimos asked with a hint of frustration. “Or not sulking? I need to know.”

“I’m fine,” said Lan, glaring at Serafina’s reflection in the mirror. “Thank you for your concern.”

“I’m not concerned. I’ve been sent to inform you it’s morning.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Serafina said dryly. “We never would have determined that for ourselves. It isn’t as though I passed by a hundred windows on my way here and could see the sun for myself.”

The sun? Lan pulled free of her handmaiden’s grip and turned around again. “Has it stopped raining?”

Deimos inclined his head. “Our lord would like to know if you will see him off.”

“Now?”

“If you are well enough.”

“She’s well enough,” Serafina said before Lan had a chance. Or at least, before Lan would admit she’d had a chance. Or an answer. “She’ll be up as soon as she’s dressed.”

Deimos looked Lan over, clearly unable to see the difference between a dressed woman and a woman wearing a robe, but he didn’t argue the point. He was a Revenant; he knew everything there was to know about killing the living. When it came to putting clothes on them, he deferred to a handmaiden’s judgment. “Quickly, please,” was all he said. “They’re all waiting. Phobos, fall out.”

The dog did so, head high and tail wagging as he followed the dead man from the room. Lan watched them go in the mirror, waiting until the door was shut behind them and it was long past too late to say, “I don’t feel well.”

“Nonsense.” Serafina packed away her ritual tools and went briskly to the wardrobe. “I suppose you’ll want to wear white for him, no matter how pasty it makes you appear.”

“I don’t care what I wear. He’s leaving me,” Lan grumbled, her eyes locked with those of her scowling reflection. The face she saw was not, she had to admit, the picture of an ideal traveling companion at the moment. “Why the hell should I dolly up for him? What has he ever done for me?”

The sound of rattling hangers and rustling fabric stopped. Serafina turned all the way around and stared at her, one eyebrow raised and lips pressed tight together.

“Yeah, right, fine, he ended the Eaters, but what else? I gave up everything to be with him! He gets all of me and I have to share him with all of Haven. Not even all of Haven’s d…people,” she amended grudgingly. “Now I’ve got to share him with the bloody lightbulbs!”

Serafina sniffed and came out of the wardrobe with the closest thing she had to a white gown—the creamy underdress that went with that blue lacy nightmare—and laid it out over the foot of the bed. “If you wished to be his sole concern, you should have remained with him in the cave instead of convincing him to return to his duties as our lord in Haven, where his d—people,” she said with special emphasis, “are entitled to a small measure of his consideration.”

Lan knew she was right, but wasn’t ready to be reasonable. “He’s never even said he loves me,” she muttered. “He lets me say it, but he never says it back.”

Serafina’s pretty face twisted with disdain. “He changed the world for you. What further declaration do you require?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, but sometimes a lady needs to hear the words.”

Serafina sniffed and went back to the wardrobe for a pair of slippers. “You are the most appallingly selfish creature I’ve ever met.”

Lan’s first reaction was a guilty blush, followed by a surge of anger, followed by overloud laughter. The three together left her slightly dizzied and, feeling vulnerable, she went on the attack. “That’s rich coming from you.”

“It ought to be,” Serafina said seriously. “It ought to be just as rich as cream, but that doesn’t make it a lie. I was made to love my mistress despite her faults, not to be unaware of them. She blamed her father most bitterly for the circumstances of her existence, yet it cannot be said she had no cause. He earned every accusation she ever made. Even the last,” she added under her breath. “But he’s done nothing but cosset you since you first invaded Haven and when have you ever shown gratitude?”

That hit much deeper than any words from Serafina ought to. “You can go now,”’ she said, shrugging off her robe. “I can dress myself.”

“No, you can’t. Clearly. Stop fighting with that before you tear it. Arms up. Hold still. This is exactly what I mean,” she said, shaking fabric down in effortless drapes around Lan’s body and beginning the fiddly work of lacing it up the back. “Where else have you seen such fine clothing? Where else could you hope to wear it? Yet you treat it like a rag. He showers you with gifts and you spit on them. Always, it is what you want, what he should say or do or give to you. Here you are in the most magnificent palace left to the world and you’re sulking.”

“I don’t want—” Lan began, but Serafina cut that off with a particularly vicious cinch.

“Since this is the last time you’ll have his company for the foreseeable future, you might refrain from bringing up your endless litany of wants and instead wish him well on the journey even I have noticed he has no desire to make. You might realize that, as much as you don’t want him to go without you, he doesn’t want to leave you behind, and accept that the circumstances compelling him to do so are surely serious enough without your adding to them. You might, purely as an intellectual exercise, mind you, show him your love rather than insist upon it. I don’t expect you to understand this,” she said acidly, reaching for the brush. “but sometimes a man needs more than words. Now if you’re quite through with your tantrum, sit down.”

Lan sat. The brush tore through her hair in Serafina’s rapid, remorseless strokes until the sting of tears threatened.

“Don’t you dare get your eyes any more bloodshot than they already are,” Serafina warned, pausing to pull the loose wad of hair out of the bristles before renewing her attack. “My job is difficult enough this morning. Oh, you look just awful.”

* * *

The entire palace, it seemed, had packed itself into the grand foyer to see Azrael off. The servants stood two and even three deep in places along the walls, divided by gender and by job, otherwise interchangeable in their black-and-whites. The musicians had tucked themselves up in a corner, playing something soft and cheery, all but the flute-girl, who was up on the stairs with the rest of Azrael’s dollies, all of them trimmed out to the finest and arranged just so on this and that step, like candles on a tiered cake. The Revenants were outside already, waiting in ranks beside their appointed ferry, with Deimos and his dog giving certain among them last-minute instructions. Even the gardeners and groundsmiths were there, neatly lined up before freshly-planted beds of fare-thee-well flowers.

Pity Azrael wasn’t here to see it.

Lan waited at the foot of the stairs as long as she felt like waiting, which admittedly wasn’t long, then found Azrael’s steward in the mob and told him to take her to Azrael.

“Our lord is taking a private moment to meditate before his journey,” the dead man said, but even as he said it, he fidgeted in that uncertain way he had. “He does not wish to be disturbed.”

“He’ll make an exception for me,” Lan assured him. “He always does, doesn’t he?”

The steward thought that over, then set off at a brisk walk, beckoning for her to follow.

His use of the word ‘meditate’ made her think he’d be out in the inner courtyard, but the dead man took her into the north wing, into a whole new room she’d never seen before. Azrael wasn’t in it, but the steward pointed her to yet another set of doors on the other side of the room before he withdrew, leaving her to invade or not as she chose, and bear the consequences by herself.

The doors were fairly fancy ones, even for the palace, but the room beyond was relatively plain. A massive chandelier, far too big for the room, dominated her view; there were no other furnishings of any kind, not even curtains hanging over the windows. A line of carved figures (friezes, said the Wickhamy corner of her mind, and she smiled) separated the deep red walls from the ridiculously elaborate vaulted ceiling, but they weren’t very interesting, just a bunch of blokes and horses. The fantastical pageantry present in so many rooms of the palace was noticeably missing here, and yet it was here that Azrael stood, gazing at the far wall, whose only surviving feature was a small dais, just two steps high and not even big enough to put a table.

She did not announce herself and he did not greet her, yet as she approached, he held out his arm for her to take. She did so, although she wiggled herself in under it rather than hook herself off his bent elbow. Together they watched the wall in companionable silence.

“Did he wake you?” he asked at length. “I told him if you were sleeping, not to wake you, but it only occurred to me after he left that he might knock without realizing how that might wake one. The dead don’t really understand sleep.”

“He didn’t knock and he didn’t wake me. I was already getting dressed.”

“Were you?” His eyes dimmed as they moved restlessly over the wall. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a good-bye, did you?”

“When you weren’t at breakfast, I thought you might.”

She started to tell him she hadn’t yet known he was leaving at that time, but then realized she might have to tell him the real reason she hadn’t eaten and said instead, “I wasn’t angry, I just…wasn’t hungry.”

“You haven’t had much appetite in the mornings these past days.”

“I got out of the habit,” she said and pulled a face, thinking of all the breakfasts ahead of her with Azrael’s dollies to keep her company. “Don’t suppose I’ll bother getting back into it until after you’re home again, either.”

“No,” he said with an odd sort of double meaning buried in his tone. “I don’t suppose you will.”

“But I’m not angry,” she assured him. “I’m not happy, by any stretch, but I’m not angry. I’d never let you leave thinking I was.”

“No?”

“No. The only way I’d ever let you go is with a kiss.”

He smiled at last, even if it was crooked. “We’ve done our share of angry kissing.”

“And then some,” she agreed. “Come to think of it, that’s an even better way to send you off.”

His rough hand slipped up under her sleeve to stroke at her bare shoulder, but with a distraction that made it clear it would go no further. “They’re waiting on me.”

“Let them. It’s not like they’ll leave without you.”

“True, but that is no good reason to inconvenience them. Apart from which, when I asked after you, Vivian offered to farewell me in your stead and if she will, Felicity surely will, and that means they’re all there, aren’t they?”

Lan gave him a wicked grin. “In all their frills and flashes.”

He rubbed up under his mask, muttering low and in some other language.

“But that’s sweet,” she said, snuggling closer. “Asking after me and all.”

“You’ve been ill lately.” He glanced at her and his eye narrowed. “In the mornings.”

She shrugged uncomfortably, all her attention fixed on the silver rings stitching his side. The wound itself had fully closed over the past year, but the rings remained, more ornamental than surgical at this point. She gave them a flick to hear them jingle. “Serafina says I’m sulking. If it’s true, I’m sorry. You deserve better than the kind of girl who stamps her foot and cries buckets every time she doesn’t get her way. Especially over something like this.”

He did not answer, but could not conceal the sudden tension that entered his body.

“I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t understand why it’s so important to you,” she admitted. “But, hell, they’ll always just be dots to me. You’re the one who sees stars. And you’re the one who kept them so they were still there for me to see, whether or not I ever appreciate them the way you do. And that’s all this is, isn’t it? The lights in Haven? Just more stars painted on the wall. Maybe it’s not necessary, but it’s still pretty and worth saving. I’m sorry if I made you feel like it wasn’t.”

He still did not answer, but he pulled her closer, bringing her fully into his embrace.

“And I’m sorry I missed breakfast,” she said, although she wasn’t. To hide the lie, she told the truth: “I’d have gone if I’d known it was the last one for a while.” And to complete the deception, she changed the subject, pretending great interest as she looked the empty walls over. “Where are we anyway?”

A grunt was his only answer for a time, but after another minute or so, he suddenly said, “Where do you think we are?”

Lan looked the place over again, searching in vain for clues to the room’s original purpose. Her eye kept coming back to that tiny dais and, above it, hidden in the paint, a scratched place where a shelf or something might have broken off once and been repaired. It left her with a vague feeling of familiarity, not so much echoing another room here in the palace as it did the rooms in the cathedral Wickham had been so fond of, so she said, “Is it a church?”

He considered that. “Of a sort, I suppose.” He thought some more, then said, as if to himself, “Am I praying?” and looked up through the ceiling with a frown.

“Is this one of those rooms you told me about?” she wondered. “The ones where you go and do nothing all day until dinnertime?”

“No. Truth to tell, this is only the second time I’ve ever been in this room.”

“That explains it.”

He looked at her inquiringly.

“It feels so empty in here. I mean, of course it’s empty,” she added with a nervous laugh, “but lots of rooms here are empty and this is the first one that…you know, feels it.”

“There used to be chairs here. Thrones of the royal house dating back hundreds of years, tracing the line of this land to its very foundation. I had them destroyed. I regret that now.” He ran his brooding gaze down the length of the room, lingering here and there on empty space. Remembering them, perhaps. “No matter,” he said, turning away. “It is years done…and this day is not waiting for me. Come, Lan. Walk with me a little while.”

She fell into step at his side, following him through the echoing halls of the palace, close but no longer touching. He was in no hurry to make his way to the grand foyer, but took the first door they came to that led outside, and from there, out onto the lawn. The grass had been freshly-cut despite the early rain and all the air smelled green and sweet, yet Azrael’s mood only darkened as they made their way around the walls.

“Have you ever seen such a bleak summer?” he muttered, there in full sunlight.

Lan laughed. “Yeah, actually, I have. And if I have, then so have you.”

“This accursed land.”

“It’s a nice day,” she insisted.

“Is it?” He raked his eyes across the sky. “Should it be?”

“Well…not too nice, maybe. I’m not so superstitious as some, but I wouldn’t want to see the sun come out golden and bloody flocks of pigeons fill the air the minute you put a foot out of Haven’s gate.”

“Doves.”

“Eh?”

“Flocks of doves, you meant to say, not flocks of pigeons.”

“Same thing.”

“Not at all. One stands for pestilence. The other, peace.”

“Same bird, though. Doesn’t matter what it stands for. Reckon you could say anything is an omen. See that tree there?”

He looked. “Elder.”

“That’s an omen now,” Lan declared.

He glanced at her, his mouth twisting with reluctant amusement. “I hope not.”

“And see that butterfly? Omen.”

It took wing as the last word left her mouth, fluttered into Azrael’s shadow, and dropped dead to the ground.

“See that—”

“Stop talking, Lan, I pray you. Ah, and there they are,” he murmured as they rounded the last corner and the ferries came into sight. “It is a very good thing I do not believe in omens.”

Lan looked, but saw only a long train of ferries, all their proud colors painted over in plain black. Their headlamps were all on, she saw, because the dead didn’t know any other way to drive than to the letter of the laws the living wrote; although the rains had stopped for now, they would surely fall again before the end of this day and a courteous driver must remain conscious of visibility. She supposed, with their black bodies and glowing white eyes, they might resemble a line of grims with a little imagination, but she didn’t want to ask if that was what Azrael saw when he looked at them, just in case he had it in him to believe in omens after all.

Deimos had noticed them and halted his restless patrol of the line to await his lord’s signal to board. Azrael gave it, using the same gesture to beckon his captain of the Revenant guard to him. The dog came as well, tail tucked and whining. When its master knelt, the dog cringed against the dead man’s side and rolled to expose its shivering belly.

“The time has come, Captain,” said Azrael, moving away to get a better view of the ferries just as if he were unaware he was also putting more distance between him and the anxious animal. “I leave Haven and its people to you. I am confident I leave it well-protected.”

Deimos put a hand on his dog’s neck and coaxed it to sit, although it still shivered and its eyes as it tracked Azrael’s pacing showed the whites all around. “I stand ready, lord.”

“And who will be acting captain in your place?”

“Any of my men, I’m sure, would serve you well, lord.”

“I’m sure. But you’ve elected…?”

“Lelantos.”

“Excellent.” Azrael spared the dog an assessing glance and put a little more distance between them. “Lan has my full authority in all matters. You will see to it this is understood.”

Deimos nodded and moved to Lan’s side. The dog came with him and sat importantly on Lan’s slipper.

“I expect you to act as her intermediary and advisor, whenever necessary.” Azrael looked away, overly casual and thinly smiling. “And to aid her in her affairs.”

“Affairs, my lord?”

“Yes, Captain. Lan is going to have affairs in my absence.”

“You ass,” said Lan, but she had to smile too.

Brows knitting, the Revenant looked at Lan. “Affairs of state?”

“Affairs of…of bloody affairs!”

“With you,” Azrael elaborated.

“I see.” He took it well, although that faint furrow never quite smoothed itself away. “I’ll do what I can, although sexual intercourse requires a certain physiological response, which I, being dead, cannot accomplish without artificial means.” He stopped talking when Lan clapped both hands to her face, waited for her to drop them, then finished, “I will procure a device immediately.”

Azrael’s shoulders were very slightly shaking, although he was careful not to make a sound.

“That won’t be necessary, Captain,” said Lan, her words riding a sigh. “Thanks anyway.”

Deimos accepted this with a nod, neither relieved nor disappointed, and turned back to Azrael. “Shall I be undertaking affairs with all your companions, lord?”

“In good conscience, I can’t recommend it,” he said dryly. “However, your leisure time is your own. For now, if you would, please inform them I will be departing shortly. If there are any among them who would wish a private word with me before I go, I will receive them. I trust you have no objection,” he remarked as the Revenant rose and took his whining dog away.

“I guess not. They have as much right to say goodbye as I do.”

“I refer to my appointment of Deimos as your intermediary while I am away.”

“Oh.” The inadequacy of that response only made itself more apparent in the silence that followed. Lan dug deep in her internal store of enthusiasm and came up with, “I’m sure he’ll do fine.”

“I’m sure.” Azrael watched the ferries board, one by one by one. “You’ve not mentioned Wickham since our return.”

Lan opened her mouth, but there was nothing to say, so she closed it again and just waited.

“To my knowledge, you’ve made no attempt to call upon him, either to make arrangements to resume your lessons or to apologize for the means by which you chose to end them. I can only infer, therefore, you know he is dead.”

“Deimos told me.”

He nodded, his attention fixed on the activity in the courtyard. His voice was steady, almost indifferent, but the light in his eyes was not as he said, “It is important to me that you understand he asked to be released from the life I gave him. It was not a punishment. And if I had known, had thought there was even the slightest chance you would return—”

“I believe you.”

They waited, standing close together, but not quite touching. Azrael watched the ferries fill and drive away. Lan watched the clouds wisp across the sky.

“I buried him,” he said abruptly.

She looked around, surprised and pleased. “Did you really? Here?”

“No. At the Natural History Museum.” He glanced at her. “Do you approve? I know you don’t care for museums, but he was a scholar at the heart of him. I wished to honor his memory.”

“It’s a good place. Brilliant columns there. He loved columns.”

“I regret you never knew him in life. He, too, thought he could save the world with the right words.” Azrael lapsed into a short silence, but not a brooding one. It ended with a chuckle. “I never knew a man so dishonest, nor one so respectful and engaging as he went about it. He did not conceal his lies, but invited them in and sat them at the table as guests, so that we could both nod at them. I had no experience until then with conversation as an art and he was so very talented an artist that I would have tolerated his deceptions indefinitely merely for the pleasure of his company.” His smile faded. “But his masters had other plans and he proved more loyal than wise. I killed him in a fit of temper and raised him in an equally unfortunate fit of remorse. I did very badly by him, Lan.”

“I don’t think he held it against you.”

“But he knew. All these years and I never guessed he knew,” he mused. “I so feared to see how he had been diminished by my actions that I avoided him as much as possible and so deprived myself of enviable company I shall never have again. I have but forged one more link in a great chain of regret.” His eyes dimmed as he sank once more under the shadow of his own unquiet. “It disheartens one.”

“You know what Master Wickham would say to that, don’t you?”

“No. Tell me.”

“You have to want the time you have.”

Azrael uttered a low, humorless laugh and said, “Why?”

Lan shrugged. “Because you have it, whether you want it or not. And life is motion. That’s something else he used to say all the time. You can move toward what you want or away from it, but you can’t stop, so you have to want the time you have, because it’s all the time you get.”

“That loses its intended impact when ‘all the time you get’ is all the time there is.”

“Master Wickham would say that only means you have a limitless potential for change.”

“Would he indeed?”

“He’d say no one can live your life for you and no one else can waste it. He’d say you carry the sole responsibility for your own success or failure.” Lan rolled her eyes a little. “And then he’d say the marble galleries at the Royal Courts of Justice give the best view of the spandrels, which are the finest surviving examples of spandrels from the late-Victorian gothic revival style of arches and we should go have a gander because the grout in the Great Hall is bloody marvelous. I’m going to miss him,” she said as he threw his head back and laughed. “But he’s in a good place now.”

Still smiling, Azrael cast a glance at the sky and looked back at her inquiringly.

“A museum,” she explained. “Thank you for that. It means a lot to me that you put him in a good place. Can he have a stone too? You know the kind I mean.”

“Deimos can make the necessary arrangements. Ask for a monuments mason.” He paused, then haltingly said, “James.”

“Ask for James?”

“No. You…you’ll need his full name for the monument. James Wickham. Ah, Felicity, how lovely you look this morning,” he called, too suddenly. He raised his hand and beckoned the first of his dollies to him from the polite distance where Deimos had been holding them. “Your pardon, Lan. This won’t take long.”

Lan moved away to give them privacy, but not far. His dollies could give him all the goodbyes they wanted, but hers would be the last face he saw before he left. In the meantime, she took up a position beside Deimos, where she could remain conspicuous, but not overbearing as she watched a procession of other women flutter over her man.

“Do you know what a monuments mason is?” she asked, since it appeared they’d be at it for a while.

“Yes.”

“Can you find one for me?”

“At once. Phobos, fall in.”

“It doesn’t have to be this instant,” said Lan as the Revenant turned to go. “I know you want to see him off as much as I do.”

Deimos hesitated, then sat his dog once more and clasped his hands behind his back. “Thank you.”

The first dolly flounced off with a sniff in Lan’s direction. The second stepped up, careful to keep her hands behind her back, although she managed a pasty sort of smile for Azrael to admire. And he did.

“Did he just say she looks lovely this morning too?” Lan inquired pleasantly.

Deimos cut her a cautious glance, since he was exactly as far from the goodbying as she was and could overhear it just the same. “Yes.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

The dead man took a deep breath solely to force it out again. “You’re very attractive.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Captain, you don’t have to—”

“I can notice these things, you know,” he interrupted, staring straight ahead at the pastel-colored skirts simpering up to Azrael. “I can’t feel anything about it, but I notice.”

“Just stop,” she sighed, more annoyed with herself than with him. “I know he’s only flattering them and I don’t want flattery, not from him and for sure not from you.”

“I am incapable of flattery.”

“And I’m not pretty.”

“Pretty, no,” he said with a soldierly shrug. “I would not call you pretty. Serena, there, is pretty. Aileen is pretty. Even Felicity, I find pretty, provided you look no deeper than her face. I think I must be partial to blondes,” he muttered, frowning. “I wonder why.”

Lan did not answer, but she found herself thinking of a creased photograph—a woman and two young girls, all blonde.

“There must be thousands of pretty faces in Haven,” Deimos was saying now, raking his soldier’s gaze across the assembled on-lookers, both living and dead. “But I can’t call many attractive.”

“No one you’d strap on a diddle-cob for, eh?”

“None but you.”

He said it with such disinterested conviction, she could only laugh.

“Because I’m so attractive?”

He heaved another of those terse, needless sighs. “Because you have our lord’s right of rule and I must obey your commands.”

She laughed again. She knew she shouldn’t—Revenants had no sense of humor and Deimos didn’t get to be their captain by being the least Revenant of them all—but this was such a bizarre avowal of loyalty that she couldn’t help herself. “Yeah, but come on! I’d be commanding you to be my dollyboy!”

“Our lord’s authority is yours. How you use it is of no consequence.”

“You’d obey any order? Seriously.”

“I am always serious.”

“Good to know,” Lan murmured, her attention drifting back to Azrael and the pretty face sending him off. “Very good to know.”

Deimos sent her a searching, faintly frustrated stare. “Then I…should acquire a prosthetic?”

“I think we have a good relationship just the way we are, Captain. I wouldn’t want to complicate it with sex. But I appreciate your dedication.”

“Thank you,” he said, whether in response to the latter half of her remarks or the former, it was not clear, but in any case, it was heartfelt.

They said no more after that, but the quiet was companionable. Deimos watched his Revenants and occasionally patted his dog. Lan watched Azrael. At last, the dollies had all come and gone and all but one of the ferries had driven away. The last of the assembled dead boarded, but the door was not closed after them. Azrael went to have a word with the driver, then turned and looked at Lan.

She reminded herself it was only for a few days. A month at most, he’d said. And it was for Haven, for keeping the last lights on in the last great city.

Lan took a breath, forced a smile, and went to him. He couldn’t kiss her through the mask and she knew better than to think he’d take it off, here with his dollies looking on, but he raised her hands to the slit of his false mouth and she pretended that was good enough, for his sake.

“Give me a word to send me on my way,” he ordered, lightly squeezing her fingers. “One gentle word to remind me of you when I am tempted to think too deeply on all my reasons for undertaking this journey…and all the reasons I might return.”

“Oh balls, no pressure there.” She considered. “Hagioscope,” she decided.

His eyes flickered. “What?”

“It’s the word for when you have a tiny little hole in an interior church wall just so you can see the altar on the other side,” she informed him.

“And…you tell me this because…?”

“It’s the most interesting word I know. I mean, think about it. That needed a word.”

His head tipped back, then cocked to one side. His gaze dimmed as it grew distant. “That is interesting,” he murmured.

“Now give me one.”

“Jentacular,” he said after lengthy contemplation. “It is used to describe that which pertains to breakfast.”

“What, like kippers or porridge?”

“I suppose it could refer to anything, not merely foodstuffs, provided they are used for breakfasting and only that. A jentacular sideboard, for example. Jentacular napkins. An entire room might be jentacular, if one never entered but to breakfast.”

“That’s bloody marvelous, that is,” said Lan with sincere admiration.

They were interrupted by a certain etiquette teacher’s rather unmannerly shout: “Get back here this instant! Get back, I say! You’re not dressed! You—Someone catch the little demon!”

In the next instant, the girl, Heather, bolted through the door and out into the courtyard, hugging her long skirts up around her belly in both arms. Nimbly evading the snatching hands of all the servants and pikemen who stood in her way, she zig-zagged across the courtyard, her bare feet slapping on the stones and splashing through puddles of last night’s rain until she skidded to a stop in front of Lan.

“Here,” she panted, digging into the mess of her skirts and thrusting a fistful of flowers, roots and stems, up at Azrael. “I picked ‘em for you.”

This was the first time Lan had ever seen Azrael taken aback when she wasn’t herself the cause. She stood back, smiling, and watched as Azrael accepted this offering with appropriate gravity. A small drift of petals let go as soon as he took them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“There was cake, but I ate it.” Heather dragged her sleeve across her nose and let her skirts drop. “Yeah, so. Bring me lots of presents.”

Azrael’s eyes flickered. He looked at Lan, as if for help, then down at the girl again. “All right.”

“Cheers, then.” She waved, scooped up her skirts and ran back into the palace, ducking the switch with a flexible ease Lan genuinely envied, although by the sound of it, she got nabbed just inside.

“That was unexpected,” Azrael remarked, staring after her. “I cannot think of any cause I have given her to show me affection.”

Lan could, but now was not the time to remind him of the life the child had known before Haven. She said instead, as noncommittally as she could, “Kids can surprise you.”

“That they can.” He glanced at her, seemingly about to speak, then moved abruptly away and spent altogether too much time placing the flowers in the ferry. Keeping his back turned and his tone as careful as her own had been, he said, “I find the longer I live, the more inclined I am to celebrate surprises. You, now. Ages after I believed the world had nothing new to show me, you have proved me wrong again and again. I would have you do so once more before I go.”

She blinked. “Do what? Surprise you?”

“Please.” He straightened and faced her again, broadly smiling beneath a too-bright stare. “As an omen, shall we say? They needn’t all be sinister. Send me off with one more first, mine…or yours.”

Sure, like she kept surprises in her pockets. Lan thought, rubbing distractedly at her stomach, which had begun to cramp and roll with its own sinister promise, and slowly said, “All right, I have one. Come here.”

He came at once, taking both her hands in his and gazing at her with what felt like far too much heat, even for a goodbye.

“Closer,” she told him. “It’s a secret. I have to whisper.”

He bent, turning his head so that she could touch her lips to the ragged shell of his ear. He waited, tense and silent.

Too conscious of the living and the dead looking on, even if none of them were near enough to hear, she lowered her voice to no more than a breath and said the words she had never said out loud, words she had herself only heard once before, because secrets were more precious than ‘slip in this world, and this was the most precious she had left: “My mother’s name was Maya.”

As soon as it left her mouth, she felt silly. What could it mean to him, another name? Blushing, confused, she would have stepped back, but his grip on her hands tightened.

He looked at her, his eyes dim in the sockets of his mask. It seemed to Lan that he was too quiet for too long, but that bad moment blew away like smoke when he smiled. He shook his head, not at her, and laughed softly, still not at her. “Thank you,” he said and closed her briefly in a full embrace. “Ah Lan…my Lan…thank you.”

Then he released her, raised his hand once to all those watching, and put himself without another word into his waiting ferry. The Revenant acting as his driver started the engine at once and before the door was even shut, the ferry was pulling away. One of Azrael’s dollies called out loudly and some of the others followed suit, like birds on a wire, all fluttering feathers and shrill voices, but when the ferry was out of sight, they all stopped.

The gardeners were the first to disperse, moving away to pull up all the plants they’d put there for farewelling to make room for the plants that would be welcoming him home. Their return to their established routine started a ripple of like movement among the rest of the dead and although it was not a long walk back from the road to the palace stairs, by the time Lan got there, the foyer was empty apart from the assembled guards who presumably waited upon Deimos for their dismissal, Azrael’s dollies, and the girl, dancing on the end of a switch while her instructor drilled her on the finer points of etiquette.

“So,” said Lan, once more rubbing her stomach, as if it were a surly cat that could be quieted with petting. Like a cat, it growled beneath her hand and twisted, all claws. Doing her best to suppress a wince, she turned to Deimos, who had followed her inside and stood with his dog at attention just behind her. “Do I have to give you orders or do you mostly know what you should be doing?”

“Giving orders now,” one of the dollies said, just a hair too loud to be a mutter.

Deimos’s steely eyes shifted in that direction before they came back to Lan’s. “I can manage the city’s concerns, although I stand ready to receive your will. Have you any orders?”

“No,” said Lan, ignoring the whispers behind her. “I just want to know if I can go back to bed without Haven turning tits-up.”

“High opinion of herself, hasn’t she?” someone not-muttered and someone else sniffed.

“Have you any orders?” Deimos asked again, holding Lan’s eyes with his as he put a hand on the hilt of his sword.

“I don’t know,” Lan sighed and turned around. “Do I?”

Azrael’s mouthy red-head gathered in her cohorts with a glance and, as they formed ranks around her, fixed Lan with a sneering sort of stare. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she sniffed. “I don’t know the first thing what it takes to run a city the likes of Haven and I wouldn’t pretend I do. But then, I’m just a dolly, not some jealous chavvy who thinks being under him last puts her above them what’s been under him before her.”

Lan had to take a moment to work that out. “Is that what you think I am?” she asked, once she was fairly sure she had it. “His dolly?”

The red-head blinked, a bit nonplussed by the placidity of Lan’s response, but recovered quickly. “And what do you think you are? His wife?”

“Oh no. No, I’m a magician.”

This was not the answer her opponent was expecting. She tried to hold onto her haughty face, but it slipped some and never quite pinned itself back. “You’re what?”

“A magician.” Lan caught Heather’s attention and asked, “Want to see me do a trick?” When the child curiously nodded, Lan turned to Deimos and said, “Captain, round up those eight bitches there and take them to France.”

Deimos turned at once and gestured. Sixteen pikemen stepped up in unison and laid hands on eight gasping and protesting dollies. The ninth gripped her flute and frowned.

“Coo,” said the child, impressed.

“Hold up a moment,” ordered Lan as the dollies were pushed into a line preparatory to being marched out into the courtyard. She went directly to the red-head and put her face right up in the other woman’s face. “You call me a jealous chavvy just once more and I’ll act like one, is that clear?”

Thin lipped, lightly trembling, the other woman nodded.

Lan stepped back and nodded at Deimos. “Turn them loose.”

Freed, she and her fellows made themselves scarce, leaving only the flute-player and the girl for Lan to deal with.

“Want to see me do another one?” Lan asked the girl.

Heather nodded excitedly.

“For my next trick—” Lan looked at her former etiquette teacher, standing behind Heather. “—I’m going to make that switch disappear. Forever.”

The dead woman opened and closed her mouth a few times, her eyes darting from the switch in her hand to Deimos and back to Lan, but in the end, she surrendered it without speaking at all.

“I’m going to be a dolly someday,” Heather said admiringly.

Lan mustered a smile for her and even patted her head, much as she’d hated having her head patted at that age. “No, you won’t. Go on, then. Go to lessons.”

“I hate lessons,” grumbled the child, but she went, goose-stomping down the hall toward the library with her tutor.

Now it was just Lan and the flute-player.

Deimos glanced from one to the other of them, rolled his eyes, and gestured again to the pikemen. Soon, they were alone.

“You didn’t pack me in with the rest of them,” the flute-player said.

“I wasn’t sure what she’d say to me next. It would have been awkward to have to take just you back and send all the rest off.”

“Because I bled for you?” The flute-player tossed her blonde curls. “We all bled for you.”

“Because he loves your music.” It came out sounding like a curse. Lan made an effort to swallow her anger, but it kept rising. “But I don’t. And I don’t want to see you from now until he comes home, you get me?”

She headed for the hall, silently congratulating herself on getting out of the room without punching anyone in the tit.

“You’ve got your nerve, don’t you?” said the flute-player, not loudly. “Turning up your nose at me after you ran out on him.”

Oh…almost.

Lan turned around. “I ran out on him,” she repeated. “Me.” And started walking back. “You’re the one who ran out on him, you cold bitch. You left him there with all their bodies. All it would have cost you was one night, one hour, of human fucking compassion and you ran out.”

Incredibly, the flute-player laughed, but before Lan’s vision could make the hot leap to red, she said, “Is that what you think happened?” And then her smile faded into something that sure looked genuinely surprised and angry. “Is that what he told you?”

“No,” Lan admitted, beginning to frown. “But that’s what I heard.”

“Who said so?” the other woman demanded and rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course. Batuuli’s deadhead dressing girl.” Shaking her head, the flute-player regarded Lan and finally nodded at one of the pretty sofas tucked up against the foyer wall. She went over without looking to see if Lan followed. And of course, Lan did. Side by side, arms and thighs touching, each of them staring straight ahead, they sat.

“They were all dead already when he sent for me,” she began. “Just me, not all of us. So I knew it would be bad, but I never thought…Anyway, they were already dead. And himself just sitting there, reading his cup as he does in his moods. He didn’t say anything to me.” She rolled her shoulder a little. “I didn’t really think he would. I’ve been here four years. Not the longest of any, but longer than most. I know his moods.” She fell quiet a moment, then shook her head again. “I thought I knew. So I played for him.”

She said the next bit with the flute, piping something low and slow, but not sad, somehow. It filled the air, first with sound and then with feelings—not her own, but real all the same. Lan severed herself from it as much as she could, but she couldn’t listen and still be entirely herself, not until the music stopped.

“It wasn’t enough,” the other woman said, lowering the flute. Even now, she continued fingering at the keys, as if the music were still going on inside her. “And maybe I should have let it alone, but I couldn’t do that either. It’s been years for us, you understand? Years. And it was never…never…good. I can’t want him,” she said with sudden, savage despair. “He’s horrible and I can’t! But he’s been a fair johnny all these years and never once took what I couldn’t give him, even if he’d already paid for it, so I went to him anyway. Like you said, one hour of human fucking compassion, right? So I went. He let me take my clothes off. He let me put my hands on him. He let me do whatever I did, but he didn’t do nothing back. Not a thing. So I had to ask, you know. I asked him what he wanted. And he said you.”

The flute-player stopped there, as if to give Lan a chance to explain, then shrugged and went on. “I suppose you could have walked out with your head up. Hell, you could have stayed and done him anyway, done him so he never wanted anyone else again. Well, bully for you, but I couldn’t. I got my clothes on…mostly on…and I ran. I’m no porcelain dolly, think of me whatever you want, but I’m still a woman and woman’s got her pride even when she’s got nothing else.”

The flute-player stood and headed for the stairs, but stopped before she got there and turned back. “You’d been gone months,” she said, carving out each word separately and stabbing it in. “You were gone and I was there, naked on his damned lap for the first time in years and he said he wanted you. Understand?”

Lan nodded, hugging her stomach and staring at her knees.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll understand when I say I’m happy to ask Tempo to keep us in rehearsal until himself comes home.” Her voice never raised, never strained, but all the same, she was not calm. “I’d be happy if you ferried me off to France. I’d be happy to do any damned thing at all as long as it meant I never had to see you again.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lan and tried to mean it. “I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t ask, did you? Why should you care what the truth was when you’ve got your deadheads to tell you stories?” The flute-player managed a few more steps and turned back again. “I called you a traitor once and I guess I’m sorry. I had no call to do that. We all turned our backs on someone to show him our bellies. But you are a jealous chavvy. If you weren’t, you’d maybe realize there ain’t a one of us who cares you’re with him, and some who might even be glad, but fucking him don’t make you queen over us. We lived here long before you ever showed and we shouldn’t have to worry about getting dragged out of our home and dumped in a ferry if we don’t lick up to you the right way. So if you don’t want to be called a jealous chavvy, maybe you could try not acting like one, just for the challenge of it, like, and stay out of our way instead of expecting all of us to stay out of yours.”

She set off again and this time made it all the way, leaving Lan alone in the foyer to wonder if Azrael had made it to the gates of Haven yet or if she’d managed to fuck the day over before he was even technically gone.

* * *

A month, he’d said. A month at most. A month was nothing.

So she told herself, but time was different in Haven, even when Azrael was there. When he wasn’t, it might as well have stopped entirely.

She did her best to keep busy, but there just wasn’t anything to do. Deimos found her the monument man she asked for, but after telling him what she wanted the stone to say—dedicated to the memory of James Wickham, friend and teacher—she wasn’t needed for anything. She went to see the stone set and to wander a little while through the empty museum, looking at bones and pots and columns until the oppressive weight of all that collected time crushed her out. She went to the place where Tehya’s garden had been, with half a thought to plant some flowers back and maybe have it done and ready to surprise Azrael with on his return, but the sight of that scorched pit and blackened stones sapped her of any energy she had for the project and she never went back. She walked out to the wall once and sat there all day, staring into the wastes where not even Eaters walked any more, until Deimos fetched her home. He offered to take her in a car if she wanted to watch for their lord’s return, but under no circumstances was she to go anywhere without telling him again. She told him that wouldn’t be necessary and it wasn’t. She did not leave the palace again.

She did not go to dinners. She did not go to breakfasts. She ate her meals on a tray in her room and. More often than not, sent them away unfinished. She wasn’t moping, despite what Serafina said, or at least, she wasn’t only moping. The troubles with her stomach persisted, although it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been before Azrael left. It was easy to blame the food—nothing tasted right—but she’d eaten rats, roaches and peaches plenty of times in her life without fading away over it. She didn’t feel well. Even on those rare days she didn’t spend her first hour after waking hunched over the chamberpot as she contemplated the meaning of life, she never really felt well. Sad, tired, sore and sick: this was her new normal.

But it would only be a month, he said. A month at the very most.

So she waited.

* * *

Morning arrived, as it always did these days, with the sound of curtain rings sliding on a metal rod. Light like spears stabbed in under her eyelids. Lan groaned and pulled the blanket over her head, which worked fine until it was yanked away.

“Good morning,” said Serafina, reciting her customary greeting. “You look awful.”

“Go away.”

She did, or at least she seemed to, but she was back in mere moments with a breakfast tray, forcing Lan to sit up and accept it. Hot coffee with cream and sugar, bread and marmalade, bangers, kippers, black puddings and a huge wedge of lemon cake—all her favorites, together on one tray. The sight of it stirred nothing but a twinge of guilt vaguely tied to the faceless, nameless cooks who were clearly trying so hard to stimulate an appetite she simply didn’t have these days.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Oh, don’t be difficult!” snapped Serafina, already rummaging through the wardrobe for a suitable morning gown. She brought back several, holding them up one a time and eyeing Lan critically over the neckline. “Apricot? No. Lavender? No. Lemon? Ugh, no. Coral,” she decided, holding up a mass of heavy skirts attached to a beaded corset.

“I hate pink.”

“It isn’t pink, it’s coral, and you don’t have to like it, you just have to wear it. Stop playing with your food and eat. You have appointments.”

“Horseshit.” Lan picked up a slice of pudding and ate it with her fingers. It was all right at first bite, but left an unpleasant aftertaste and sat in her stomach like lead. “I don’t have anything to do. I don’t have to get dressed to do nothing. I don’t even have to get out of bed if I don’t want to.”

“You want to today.” Serafina draped the hated pink morning dress over her arm and continued looking through the wardrobe, now on the ‘night’ side.

“No, I really don’t.” Lan had another bite of pudding, chasing it down with coffee, but that aftertaste endured, turned cloying with the addition of cream and sugar. She put her cup down and pushed it all the way to the edge of her tray. “I don’t think I feel very well.”

“Oh, you’re always saying that, just because you’re bored.” Serafina looked back at her to roll her eyes where Lan could see it, then returned her attention to the gowns. “Instead of arguing with me, you ought to have asked why I made appointments.”

“Because you’re bored,” Lan muttered, but her curiosity had been piqued, damn it. For all her faults, and there were many, Serafina was a very good handmaiden and as such, she did not go out of her way to make more work for herself. “Okay, fine. Why?”

Serafina glanced back over her shoulder with a smug smile. “Our lord sent a messenger to say they’re on their way home. Oh, have a care, you clumsy cow!”

Lan had sat up, jostling her tray and sloshing coffee over the bedspread. She mopped it up hurriedly with her napkin, gulping down the rest of her cup to prevent further spills, and sputtered, “Today? They’re coming back today?”

“No, tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Which gives us a much-needed chance to put you in order, to which end—” Serafina pulled Lan’s old nemesis, the black gown with the beaded corset, from the wardrobe with a flourish. “—I have made appointments! You’re welcome. Now hurry and eat.”

Lan tried a little marmalade on her black pudding in the hopes of smothering that nasty aftertaste. It did seem to help and actually tasted pretty good. She had another bite and then another and then, without any warning at all, her mouth dropped open and she yarked it all up into her lap.

Lan had just enough time to register Serafina’s look of shock and to take a short, choking breath, and then she puked again, hard, spraying coffee and bile out her nostrils in twin burning streams. She doubled over, gasping and choking, and puked a third time, making a sound like a barking dog and seeing to her horror just an amazing glut of bright red blood come honking out between her fingers to splatter over her breakfast tray.

“My God!” Serafina said and then dropped her dresses and came running over to seize and steady Lan’s shivering shoulders.

“I think I shit the bed,” said Lan in a small, stunned voice. “I’m so sorry.”

“Never mind that. Come along. Can you stand? Why didn’t you tell me you were really ill?” she demanded in a sudden furious rush, then just as suddenly turned soft and consoling, saying, “Just this way, a few more steps. I’ll clean you up and send for the doctor.”

“Don’t do that. I’m okay,” said Lan and she did feel better, although a bit pale and headachy. “I think I just ate too much too fast.”

“I don’t really care what you think. I never have and if I ever did, it certainly wouldn’t be now. I’m sending for a doctor. My God,” she said again, looking back at the bed with wide, round eyes.

“I’m begging you, don’t! Azrael will find out!”

“Whereas if I don’t and he finds out you’re ill and I did nothing, why, that can only end well!”

“But I was sick when he left!” Lan wailed. “He’ll think I’ve been sick this whole time! He’ll be all noble and concerned and won’t lay a bloody finger on me and he’s been gone forever!”

“Never mind you and your warmblood hormones. Let’s just get you cleaned up. Here, lean on this.” Serafina propped Lan against the wall and started water running in the bath, shooting her nervous glances over her shoulder every few seconds. “You would do this to me today. I swear you plan these things. Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“If you tell me how rotten I look one more time, I’m going to start crying,” Lan said crossly.

That seemed to satisfy her, but as soon as Lan was settled in the bath, Serafina was out of the room and calling down the hall for a guard. Lan was left to bathe herself, which she did just fine. Whatever fit had taken her in the bed seemed to have passed, although she was still a bit achy in places. Mostly what she felt was embarrassment.

When the doctor arrived—the dead one again, thus guaran-damn-teeing Azrael would hear about this—she was out of the bath and toweling off, and except for the taste in her mouth and a lingering burn in her throat and nostrils, she felt right as rain. He looked her over anyway, bow to stern, putting his cold hands just anywhere he felt like it and mm-hmming to himself.

“You were eating, you say?” The doctor moved over to the sheets Serafina had stripped and had a look. “What is this?”

“Coffee and pudding.”

“Pudding? For breakfast?”

“Black pudding,” Lan amplified. “You know. Blood sausage.”

“I see, I see. They make that from pork’s blood, don’t they?” Without waiting for an answer, the doctor nodded and started packing his doctory kit away. “Undercooked pork. Standard stomach complaint. One of the others was off her color after the sausages this morning as well. Must have a word with the kitchen.”

Serafina sniffed. “If you’re speaking of that horrid little child, she was caught in the wine cabinet. The only color she was off was cabernet red.”

The doctor met her sniff and raised her a haughty brow. “And was your mistress also tipping the bottle last night, madam?”

“No,” said Lan.

“So there we have it. Stomach complaint. Inform the kitchen to adjust their standards accordingly unless they want to find themselves taking the air in our lord’s garden.”

Sniffing again, Serafina picked up the soiled bedsheets and wordlessly showed the worst of it to the doctor, particularly the red patches, drying now to brown.

“Yes, I saw the blood. Not an uncommon occurrence in episodes of violent vomiting and…and so forth, which you would know if you were a doctor and not a dresser,” he added with a pointed glance. “I’m sure it was startling, but it isn’t serious. In fact, I dare say the most significant aspect of this episode is the timing.” Now he gave Lan the Look.

“You saying I’m codding you on?” Lan asked, more amused than offended, although she was offended.

“Not at all, although if I thought you were, I would very much advise against it. Our lord does not tolerate attention-seeking deceits, even in his favorites. So! Allow her to rest and see to it that she has plenty of tea,” he declared, because Azrael could call this the Purged Lands or the Land of the Beautiful Dead or any old thing he wanted, but it would always only ever be England. “Ginger or licorice. No peppermint, nothing too stimulating.” He paused. “Should I be writing this down?”

“Rest and tea,” Serafina said frostily. “I can remember that, little as it is.”

“Very well. Call me if there’s any change in her condition. Good day, madam.”

“What an ass,” muttered Lan as soon as the door was shut on the doctor’s self-important backside.

Serafina sniffed agreement and pointed Lan toward the wardrobe. “The coral dress, then. You know the one. Let me finish here and I’ll help you with the lacing.”

“What, I’m still going? He just said I’m supposed to rest.”

“You won’t be walking to the tailor, now will you? I’ll have a car! I’ll need one to hold all your gowns,” she added, stripping the bed.

“More gowns?” Lan groaned, but slouched over to the wardrobe and had a look at the pink dress. Ugly bloody thing. She hated pink. She put the yellow one on instead, which was possibly even uglier, but didn’t have a corset. “The ones I have are fine.”

“The ones you have no longer fit properly. I’m certain once our lord sees you, he’ll order your entire wardrobe replaced, but in the meantime, your gowns need to be taken in. You—You’re in the wrong dress,” she finished blackly.

Lan quickly shook the flowy skirts down around her hips and patted them flat.

“Oh, you’re just impossible.” Serafina sighed and went to the vanity for a brush, but after just one or two painful passes through the mess of Lan’s hair, she stopped and pinned it up. “Right, it’ll have to do until the stylist has you.”

“Stylist?”

“I told you, I made appointments,” said Serafina, stressing the plural. “And I have only one day to do them all, so stop wasting time.”

“Is it going to take long?” asked Lan.

“Yes.”

“I don’t—”

Serafina, back at the wardrobe, abruptly threw down her armload of gowns and slammed the wardrobe door hard enough to bounce it back open. “I don’t care!” she hissed. “Whatever it is you don’t want, I don’t care! You don’t want to eat! You don’t want to dress! You don’t want to bathe! You don’t want to do anything and I’ve had to stand by and let you, but our lord is coming home tomorrow and I will not have him see you looking like…like…” Words failed her. She flung out her hands.

Lan looked at herself in the mirror. She sighed.

They went to the kitchens first, or rather, Serafina went to the kitchens while Lan stood out in the hall and waited for them to find a couple thermoses and fill them with hot tea. Then Serafina had to go arrange for a driver, even though Lan insisted she was fine to walk. Serafina ignored her, of course, which was irritating almost as much as it was a relief. Did she really want to walk? No, she did not. It was raining and cold and frankly, fresh air had never done anyone anywhere any good at all. But she didn’t want to go to the tailor either. She wanted to go back to bed and stay there until she’d slept away her headache and maybe wake up with Azrael’s hand sliding up her leg…but there was no telling Serafina that.

So she wasn’t in the best of moods to begin with and it wasn’t improved by seeing Deimos waiting with the vehicle, and not just any vehicle, but the Dinah Might, which had taken them all the way out to Azrael’s cave and back. She supposed she shouldn’t expect a ride in the fancy open-top car, because Serafina had all those gowns that needed fitting and they couldn’t very well be crushed up in a car’s boot, but Lan had spent altogether too much time shut up with the two of them in that particular ferry and she wasn’t happy to be seeing it again. Plus, it was raining, so not only would she be riding around in a vibrating box with two dead people, she’d be riding around in a vibrating box with two dead people and a wet dog.

But when Deimos opened the door for Lan, the interior of the car was surprisingly dog-free. Not a hair of the thing to be seen. Lan scouted about as she settled herself, checking the front seat and the floor and even peeping around into the rear hold, but Phobos remained absent. As Deimos started the engine and pulled away from the palace, she said, “Where’s your newest recruit, Captain?”

His eyes tapped at her in the rearview mirror and for once, the stone-faced expression which was the usual face worn by a Revenant struck her as contrived. “He died.”

Lan’s smile dropped away. “What? When? You fed it, right? Every day?”

“Yes.”

“And water? Were you—”

“He had some sort of skin disease,” Deimos interrupted, still without expression and without raising his voice. “I’m sure you remember.”

“Well…yeah, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“Neither did I. But it got worse. I had the doctor give me something for the sores, but they weren’t healing. They didn’t look infected, but they must have been.” He drove for a while in silence, then said, “He got out of his bed six nights ago, as I was cleaning my boots. It was the first time he had voluntarily moved so far in two days. I thought the medicine was finally helping. He lay down beside me and licked my hand. I pushed his head away so he wouldn’t drop hair into the polish. I didn’t notice he had died until I was finished.” Perhaps half a minute passed, marked by rain and the steady rumble of the road beneath their tires. “I didn’t know what to do with him, so I buried him beside the garrison.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she said awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”

Serafina looked at her. “Why?”

She didn’t know how to answer that either. Sympathy was strange enough when it was offered up for people; for dogs, it felt a bit silly.

Off they went to the tailors, where Lan’s weight loss was loudly and irritably discussed, even though Serafina had only brought four gowns to be altered and it had to be easier to take the damn things in than to let them out. But it did surprise her, because although she knew she’d been off her feed and had to have lost a pound or three, according to the tailor-books, she was very nearly as skinny as she’d been the first time she’d been fitted. As the dead folks fussed over the dresses, Lan stood by the mirrors and ran her hands up and down her naked body, frowning at bruises she couldn’t remember bumping into being and feeling bones prodding up through her dry, dull skin. What was lush, she had made lean; what was restored, now ravaged.

Nothing to be done, she told herself. He was on his way home. He’d see it and for sure, she’d hear about it, but in the meantime…nothing to be done.

Six hours or so being measured, draped, pinned and fitted was never going to rank high on Lan’s list of ways to spend a day, but it shouldn’t have left her as exhausted as it did. Any enthusiasm she may have had for it fizzled out long before the tailors finished with her. She sat quietly as often as they let her, sipping her tea in a futile effort to drown the headache that was only growing, hour by hour and then minute by minute, until it was wearing her like a poor disguise of a person and walking about on its own. Now and then, her stomach cramped, but whether it was out of hunger or nausea, even she couldn’t tell and didn’t care to know. All she wanted was a dark place to sleep, but even after she was released from the tailor, it wasn’t over.

Next on the list of appointments was a trip to the salon because Lan had let herself go to a degree beyond Serafina’s ability to repair. The dead woman who met them there took one look and declared Lan’s hair a lost cause. It was too dry and much too thin and the ends were split halfway to the roots. The only way to deal with it was to cut it off short, she insisted, after which there would be more washing and hot oil treatments and perhaps some color because Lan’s complexion was not doing her hair any favors.

Lan did want to look nice for Azrael’s return, she really did, but the smell of the stuff the stylist was setting out was like a knife directly to her headache. When the dead woman brought out the scissors, she flatly refused to sit in the chopping chair. Words were said. Volume increased. It ended with Lan storming out of the shop minus a good hank of hair over her right ear, and the stylist trying to pull the scissors out of her chest.

Now thoroughly out of humor, Lan sat in the ferry at least an hour while Serafina alternately pleaded with or berated her. At last, Serafina gave up and slammed herself into the car, only to tell Deimos to take them to the shoe shop. Lan protested, Serafina insisted, so Lan very sensibly kicked open the door and jumped out.

Deimos had only just pulled away from the salon, so they weren’t going very fast and this certainly wasn’t the first time Lan had jumped from a moving vehicle, but it was quite a different thing to land on Haven’s paved road rather than a town wall with watchmen on the ramparts with their arms out to catch her. She hit and rolled, fetching up hard on the curb, but still scrambled to her feet before the ferry could stop.

She started walking, hunched against the rain with the car creeping along beside her and Serafina haranguing her from the open door, but the buildings all looked the same in the failing light and the streetlamps hadn’t come on yet. She turned down the wrong street, but was too stubborn to admit it and turn back, so she tried to correct her course with another turn…then another…and another, until at last, the ferry stopped and Deimos got out. She stood, soaking and fuming and feeling stupid as she stared up through rain and her own swimming eyes at the names of the streets, none of which meant anything to her, listening to his boots splash up behind her.

He took his uniform jacket off and laid it over her shivering shoulders. He said, “I’m taking you home.”

“Serafina says—”

“I’m taking you home.”

So she turned around and let him guide her back into the ferry, where Serafina was waiting.

“Not five minutes and you’ve ruined your dress,” Serafina began and probably would have gone on in that vein, except that Deimos went around to her side of the ferry, opened the door, leaned in and pulled her out. Lan couldn’t hear what he said to her and it sure didn’t take long, but when he got back behind the wheel, Serafina didn’t budge.

They left her standing in the street in the rain, watching them drive away.

The rest of the ride was silent, except for the rain. The buildings, the roads, even the grass—every surface was made a mirror, reflecting the yellowish-grey sky so that Lan was trapped at the center of a world that seemed sculpted from pissy cement. Her headache dug in, throbbing just behind her eyes and making everything seem too bright, even as overcast as it was. It felt a lot like being hungover, so that when the ferry stopped and Lan got out on the captain’s arm, she thought nothing at all of bending over and retching in the gutter.

She didn’t have much to heave up, just a few swallows of tea, but it came out like razor blades and left her feeling dizzy and too short of breath.

“Are you all right?” he asked, helping her climb the shallow stairs that led to the palace. She doubted she could have done it without his help. She felt awful.

Lan nodded, but still had to hold on to Deimos for more than a minute before she felt steady enough to prove it. “I’m fine. Bad breakfast this morning, that’s all.”

Deimos nodded, turned her around and scooped her into his arms in a business-like fashion. “You shouldn’t have been out,” he told her, marching up the rest of the stairs and into the palace foyer. “I’m putting you to bed.”

“Good idea,” she mumbled.

The nice thing about dead people is, they never think anything is odd. Deimos carried her past a dozen servants and two dozen guards easily, but not one of them gave her a second look as she clung to his neck and dozed. She even entertained the hopeless cause that Azrael might not hear about this after all. All she needed was little lie-in, a little tea. She’d be right as rain tomorrow.

She let Deimos undress her and it did not occur to her to feel uncomfortable at all with his hands on her entirely naked body as he folded her limbs, one by one, into Azrael’s bed. What did seem important as she curled herself onto her side and hugged her churning stomach was, “I’m sorry about Phobos, Captain. I really am.”

His impersonal hands paused, then resumed their work. “I’m not. But I think I ought to be. I shouldn’t have kept him. I don’t know why I did. I think he reminded me of something, but I don’t know what. So thank you. Thank you…for feeling something on my behalf.”

She nodded, too tired to open her eyes, and was asleep before he even left the room.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It was a bad night. She woke, drenched and shivering in an ocean of chill sweat, slept without dreams, woke screaming with her guts ripping themselves apart inside her, slept and puked on herself, and woke as exhausted as when Deimos had put her down to find the dead doctor pulling a hypodermic needle out of her arm.

“That should control the nausea and help her sleep,” he was telling Serafina. “Make sure she has plenty of tea—”

“Bugger your tea!” Serafina hissed, actually picking up the cup next to the bed and dashing it against the wall nearest the doctor. “Our lord is mere hours away and you give me tea?!” She seized the pot and threw that too. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“Do you?” the doctor snapped back. “I told you to let her rest and you took her gallivanting out about the city—”

“Gallivanting?! How dare you! She needed gowns!”

“No, she needed rest and clear liquids! You took a simple matter of stomach complaint and turned it into what is very likely gastritis! Possibly even acute gastritis!”

“Oh and what book did you read that in?” Serafina asked scornfully.

The dead can’t blush, but the doctor came as close as the dead could. Recovering, he began to punch his equipment back into his medical bag, his eyes positively life-like with anger. “I find the care of your mistress to be woefully inadequate, madam, woefully, and if our lord asks my opinion, that is precisely what I shall tell him! Good day!”

He banged his way out the door and Serafina ran after him, solely to open the door and slam it even louder. Lan could see her there through the bed curtains, her hands in shaking fists, and managed to reach through the misery in which she floated to scoop out a little handful of sympathy.

“If he asks me,” she croaked, “I’ll say it’s bad doctoring.”

Serafina threw her a look every bit as furious as the glare she’d given the doctor and stormed over to start picking up shattered porcelain. “It won’t matter what you say,” she snapped. “You look awful. There’s no hiding it. He’ll be here tonight! He’ll see you and just what am I supposed to tell him? Oh, why did you have to be so…so difficult?”

“Sorry.”

“Yes, you’re always sorry when it’s too late to do anything else. I need a broom,” Serafina declared, throwing down her shards to smash into even smaller pieces. “Just stay in bed. You should be able to manage that, you’ve had practice enough.”

Lan winced when the door slammed, but she didn’t have energy to get up or even to roll over. She closed her eyes just as she was and hugged on her aching stomach until that medicinal darkness came that took the place of sleep when doctors were involved.

It was not especially restful, but it ate up the hours, and when its hold over her broke at last, she did feel better. It helped even more to see Serafina setting out her black dinner gown and all the shiny shit that went best with it. That meant she was going to dinner and, after a month of eating her meals off a tray as a matter of routine, that could only mean one thing.

“Is he here?” she asked as she groped for the teapot that had miraculously restored and refilled itself on the bedside table. “Is he home?”

“Finally!” Serafina exclaimed, turning on her at once. “I thought you’d sleep all night! Get in the—wait, are you going to be sick?”

Lan took cautious stock of herself. “No.”

“Good.” Serafina came swiftly to the bed and tore the covers away. “Get in the bath. No arguments! Dinner is in less than an hour and you look dreadful.”

“But is Azrael—”

“Not yet returned to the palace, but he’s sent word to say he will see you at dinner.”

“Still changing out lightbulbs, is he? A girl does like to know where she stands,” Lan muttered, pulling herself from bed and onto her unsteady feet. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the vanity. “Less than an hour?”

“And I’ll need every minute, won’t I? In the bath!”

Lan got in the bath.

In quick order, she was scrubbed, dunked, out and dried. Scented lotion softened her dry skin and powders smoothed out its uneven tone. The dress went on and for once, Lan was thankful for a corset to put curves on the wasted lines of her body. She sat and watched anxiously in the mirror as Serafina expertly painted her from her hairline to her neckline, erasing sunken eyes and hollow cheeks as if by magic. There wasn’t much she could do about Lan’s hair, but diamond combs and sprays of feathers could at least distract the eye from the choppy bits and the rest was artistically piled, pinned and lacquered into place to give the illusion of fullness. All the while, Serafina said encouraging things like, “This isn’t working,” and “Try to stay out of the light as much as you can. If he can’t see you, he can’t see how bad you look.”

Before she knew it, Azrael’s chamberlain was knocking on the door to inform them they’d run out of time and so Lan had to hurry upstairs and through the dimly-lit halls to the dining room, only to find it empty. Azrael’s steward ushered her in like she was last to arrive instead of first, holding her arm all the way to the imperial table and even pulling out her chair for her.

“Is it just me tonight?” she asked, eyeing the lower tables, which had all been fancied up with flowers and such, but not with plates and cups.

“As per our lord’s command. He should be here shortly. Shall I bring a bottle of—” The steward started to indicate the wine-lady, only to perhaps recall the last occasion on which Lan had tipped a bottle or five and freeze in that awkward position while he tried to think of some way to rescind the offer. “—coffee?” he sputtered at last, the sure knowledge that coffee did not come in bottles stamped large across his puckered face.

“No, thanks anyway, but could I get some tea? The kind Azrael drinks when he’s got, you know, tum trouble? I forget what it’s called…gentleman’s tea?”

“Gentian?”

“That’s it.”

The steward gave her a dubious look and a chance to change her mind before nodding at a servant. “Will there be anything else?” he asked as the dead man ducked out. “Consommé? Amuse-bouches?”

“Non, merci,” Lan replied unthinkingly, watching the doors. “J’attendrai.”

“Ah…yes…well, then.” The steward backed off, blinking rapidly, then turned and bustled back down the long hall to take up his position outside.

The tea came, every bit as nasty as she remembered. Her first swallow tried hard to come back on her, but she fought it down and kept it there, shuddering and staring at her cup with a despairing eye. Forewarned is forearmed, it was said, but knowing what was coming only made the second swallow harder to take and the third, harder still. It did calm her stomach though, or at least, it dulled the overused ache of it and quieted the persistent rumblings that promised more to come later that night. All the same, she couldn’t bring herself to drink more. Like a child at a dolly-party, she only brought the cup to her lips and set it down again. She told herself it was the taste of the tea and not nerves that made it impossible to drink, but she didn’t have time to torture herself over it.

Azrael arrived.

He entered the dining room like he knew she’d be watching, flinging the doors wide open so his arms were out, putting his powerful body on its most impressive display. She supposed he might have intended to stop the way he did also, to give her a chance to admire him—as she did—but it lasted just a hair too long. At this distance, his expression would have been impossible to read even if he weren’t wearing his mask, but his body gave her broader clues. She would have bet a year’s crop he’d known she was here when he walked through that door; why then, was he so surprised to see her? Not even just surprised, said that flaring of his eyes, but alarmed.

He surely couldn’t make out her features any better than she could see his and she always looked too skinny in the corsets, so what did that leave? Lan started to feel at the side of her head, but managed to turn the fidget into a wave. If he hadn’t noticed the state of her hair yet, he would soon enough.

After a moment, he raised a hand in return, but did not move from the doorway. His head tipped toward his steward. Words were exchanged, too low to be heard.

Lan drank off her nasty tea and poured herself another cup, dumping in spoonful after spoonful of sugar in an effort to make it palatable and thinning out the resulting syrup with milk. The grey muck she created was even less palatable than the unadultered tea, if possible. She choked down two swallows, hiding her shudders in her napkin, and plucked at the front of her corset in an effort to make her tits stand out a little more so her collarbones wouldn’t be quite so apparent.

“Lan!” Azrael called at last, striding toward her. “Journeys end in lovers meeting!”

“Also in lemon cake!” She held up the platter to show him, then set it aside and cupped her mouth to loudly confide, “I’m using the jentacular napkins. Shh! They don’t know yet!”

“Are you indeed?” Azrael laughed. “How devious!”

The servants waiting on the imperial table exchanged puzzled glances. One of them sidled closer to peer at the napkins.

He reached the dais at last and stood for some time with one foot on the lowest step, just looking at her. It was not the look of a man drinking in the sight of the woman he had been missing for a month and more.

“What?” Lan asked. She knew what.

He started to speak, stopped, then turned his gaze boldly on the side of her head. “Was that deliberate?”

“Sort of. She deliberately cut it and I deliberately left with the rest uncut.” Her hand half-rose and foolishly hovered. “Is it bad? I know I should have at least let her even it out, but I didn’t want it cut in the first place and I…didn’t really leave on good terms. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Not even were you shaved bald,” he assured her, ascending the dais. “In any event, it will grow.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“It wasn’t your hair I desired to hold all these empty nights.” He gathered up a loose lock and tucked it behind a pin, but his gaze dropped to her clean plate. “Were you waiting on me?”

“I don’t come to dinner—”

“For the food,” he said with her and picked up her cup. “This isn’t coffee.” He sipped. Frowned. “Gentian tea.”

“I just thought I’d try something different. I kind of liked the taste when I tried it before.”

“No one likes this taste,” he said, taking the tea with him around the table. He sipped again as he seated himself, then passed it back to her, watching closely as she drank. Signaling a servant for wine, he asked, too casually, “Are you well?”

“Don’t I look well?”

“It’s difficult to say. Your mask is thicker than mine.” He tapped a claw on the golden cheek of his false face as his eyes moved over her, their narrow light belying his nonchalant tone. “Perhaps it was a mistake to send word on ahead of my return. You’ve passed a restless night, it seems.”

“Hopefully, I won’t be sleeping too well tonight either.” She dropped him a wink and hid from closer inspection in her cup. “So, have you seen to your other dollies or do I have to worry about them wanting to flutter in here and welcome you back while I’m trying to get tapped?”

He barked out a laugh. “My, you are bold, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t had my man in a month. You’re lucky you’re not on your back in the butter dish right now. So have you?”

Azrael looked up from his inspection of the butter dish with a guarded expression. “I must confess, yours is the second living face I’ve seen since my return.”

She gave him a moment to take that back and when he didn’t, Lan knocked back another swallow of tea and set her cup down, smiling at him pleasantly. “Interesting. So. Whose ass am I kicking tonight?”

“Heather’s.”

“Eh? The kid?”

“I had presents to deliver, if you’ll recall. I thought it best to have it done so I could devote the whole of my night to you.”

“Oh.” And now she was curious. “What’d you get her?”

“Seashells.”

“Nice,” said Lan, genuinely impressed. “Did she like them?”

“She said so, although she seemed more interested in what I had to tell her of the sea itself. This is an island,” he added, allowing himself a tolerantly puzzled expression. “And it isn’t that big. How is it she’s never seen the sea?”

Lan drew deep on her diplomatic roots and did not point out the girl had spent most of her life behind walls with Eaters howling on the other side. Instead, she smiled and said, “Neither had I until I went to France.”

“She wanted to know if I’d bring her a mermaid the next time I went away.”

“And you said…?”

“I said I would, if I were fortunate enough to capture one.”

Surprised, Lan peered at him, but he seemed serious. “Are there mermaids then?”

He shrugged. “There was a time not so long ago I disdained the existence of dragons. Now I think anything may be possible. And that reminds me, I have a present for you as well.”

“For real?” she asked, pleased and a little wary. “Or is it one of those and-then-you-put-it-to-me presents? Not that those aren’t fine in their own way, but—”

“But they’re more a gift for the giver,” he agreed, chuckling into his wine. “No. Neither is it a gift that can be packaged. But I think you’ll like it. Indeed, it was your gift to me once, or would have been, if I’d given you your way.”

She thought it over and he let her think, but more time only confounded her further and in the end, she had to shake her head. “I give. You’re sure this isn’t a sex thing?”

“I’m going to build you a town,” he said softly, watching her over the rim of his cup.

A great stillness fell over her, as muffling in its silence as snow. She looked at him and could not speak.

“Just a town,” he went on, now gazing deep into his wine. “Perhaps two or three hundred stone houses in neat rows. There will be cows in the pasture. Goats on the roofs. Can you see it?”

The room blurred. She blinked once to clear it and felt a tear burn down her cheek. She nodded.

“I confess, I cannot.” He looked at her, saw the tear, and reached out to rub it away under his thumb. Studying the smear of paints he took away, he continued, “But that’s why I keep engineers. And they tell me it shouldn’t take long, given the relative simplicity of the design. The old ruins are being cleared as we speak and the entire project should be completed in no more than ten years, they say. But we won’t wait that long. What do we need to begin with but a roof over our heads and a place to sleep?”

She took a breath. And another. And finally had enough air for one word: “When?”

“As soon as can be managed. It’s where I’ve been, touring likely sites. And I found one. An island to the north. It’s small and sufficiently remote for the purpose, with nice rocky beaches and reefs to discourage visitors. It isn’t pretty,” he remarked, “but it has a certain rugged charm, I suppose, and there’s always the sea to look at. Our house will be built upon the highest rock. We shall have a view of the sea from every window.”

“You mean it, don’t you?”

“I do. I’ll build your town. This place I don’t believe in and cannot see…I’ll build it by your light. And you will stand at my side and teach me to believe in peace. Because that is what you truly want, is it not?” He offered his hand with a crooked smile and squeezed her fingers carefully when she took it. “Not more than anything, perhaps, but more than everything. You want me to believe in peace. And if you truly think I can, I’ll try.”

“But…But what about Haven? That’s why you left, you said so!”

He nodded. “To preserve Haven, yes. And I am decided the only way to do that is to leave it. Preparations for the evacuation are already underway. I intend to leave the city much as I found it. When the living come, they will find their treasures largely unspoiled. I’m told the power stations can be shut down in such a way that those with knowledge can readily have them running again, if…well,” he said, looking away with flickering eyes. “And if not, there are always candles.”

“Are you sure? Are you…I mean…Is this really what you want?”

He searched her face with a weary smile for several seconds in silence, then said, “I am certain. I can never undo what I have done. I can only move on. And as someone once told me, it isn’t moving on if you leave things the way they are. It’s giving up.”

“Thank you,” said Lan, but that wasn’t nearly enough, so she leapt up and threw herself against him, spilling his wine down his chest and hers as she crushed them together.

“And do you have a gift for me?” he inquired, smiling as he steadied her.

“It’s really more a gift for the giver,” she admitted. “But it’s a good one. Now slide that butter dish on over here.”

“No. Not here. This table did not come out the better for having been upended a year ago and I doubt it would survive the encounter.” He cupped her chin and kissed her through the mask, his eyes dim and hot against hers. “I will take you to my bed, my Lan, and make it ours.”

Tears welled again and this time, she couldn’t stop them. “I don’t…I don’t look all right,” she whispered. “I’ve been…um…sulky and I’ve…I’ve lost some weight and—”

“You’re beautiful,” he assured her, rising from his throne and pulling her up into his welcome chill. “You are so beautiful and could never be other in my eyes. Come. Let me wash away these bitter paints and taste your true sweetness. Come, my Lan…take me to bed.”

* * *

She woke in the dark, safe and a bit too cold in Azrael’s arms. For a moment, she only lay there, wondering why she was awake. Then she knew.

She rolled over, kicking free of the blankets and knocking Azrael a good one at least twice in her hurry. She heard him ask what was wrong and answered with the unlovely sound of her retching into the chamberpot. Lan groaned, gulped air, retched again, and fell back onto the bed, hugging her aching stomach and waiting to live or die.

After a minute or so, he took the chamberpot and carried it out of the room. She heard him exchange a few words with the guards outside and then he came back and sat down beside her on the bed. His eyes were dim. His hand rubbed lightly at her back, calm. “Lan.”

“I swear I’m okay.”

“Isn’t it time you told me?”

She thought about it, decided that really had made no sense and it wasn’t just her imagination, and finally rolled over to look at him. “About what?”

His expression subtly shifted toward gentle exasperation. “Do you really think I would be so angry? How long can you possibly hope to hide this? Can we not just talk about it?”

Lan squinted at him. “About what?” she asked again.

He covered his eyes and stayed that way several seconds, alternately chuckling and shaking his head. Then he dropped his hand and turned around.

“What are you doing?” Lan asked, struggling up on her elbows to watch him.

“I’m dressing,” he said unnecessarily, showing her his belt before he buckled it on. “And I advise you to do the same.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“So it is.”

“I’m sleeping!”

“Not at the moment.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“I fail to see what that has to do with anything.”

“I’m not getting dressed!”

“That is your choice, but, my dear child—” He returned to the bed with a tolerant smile and bent low, his fists braced on the cushions to either side of her, trapping her loosely within his arms. “—that is your only choice in the matter. Now. Shall you be dressed? Or shall we begin?”

The words ‘Begin what?’ rose to her lips, but no further. She wasn’t in the mood for peaches. Heaving the blankets back, she swung herself out of bed and went grumbling to the wardrobe for a clean gown.

Once dressed, he took her upstairs and all the way across the palace to the garrison and deposited her in a small, white room with nothing inside but two chairs and a dead doctor.

“Oh balls, not him again!” Lan groaned.

Dr. Deadhead was a tad more politic in his expressing it, but he seemed to share her feeling as he said, “My lord, be assured, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her beyond the usual frailties inherent in the living condition.”

“My Lan has many qualities. Frailty is not among them. There is something else here and it has continued far too long under your care.”

The doctor took a sharp breath, but thought better of arguing that particular point. Instead, with a certain surly stiffness, he said, “If you’ve no confidence in my diagnoses, lord, with your permission, I will consult my colleague. Perhaps her experience with the living will shed some light on your consort’s mysterious symptoms. But I advise you in the strongest terms, when she also fails to find an actual illness, you might consider the possibility that the patient’s malingering is no more than a childish attempt to secure your attention.”

“So noted,” said Azrael with a dismissive wave. “Fetch her for me.”

The doctor bowed and left, shooting Lan an accusatory glare on his way out the door.

“How is that fair?” Lan demanded. “I tell you there’s nothing wrong and you make me come to the doctor anyway. Now when she tells you there’s nothing, I’m malingering?”

“Is that what she’ll tell me, Lan?” he asked mildly, watching the door.

Her patience for his passive horseshit was never more than a thin veneer over the necessity of the moment and in the middle of the night, it tended to crack sooner rather than later. “What the hell else do you think she’ll tell me?” she demanded. “If you think you know something, spit it out!”

But he merely shook his head and waited.

Very soon, there were voices in the hall—the dead doctor’s, lowered to an affronted mutter and the live one’s, hoarsened by interrupted sleep—batting words back and forth in a comfortably abrasive manner as they approached.

“That’s a broad array of fairly fakeable symptoms,” Dr. Warmblood concluded, now right outside the door and making no effort either to enter or to lower her voice. And laughed. “Don’t you hush me, I don’t care if he hears. If his dolly’s pulling out her own threads, I’m sure he wants to know. One more time now, just to see if I have the full picture…when did this all start? When his lordship left?”

“Well, no,” Dr. Deadhead admitted. “It was a bit before that.”

“How long is a bit? No, no, don’t strain yourself. Begin at the beginning. Lovey comes home and the very first time you see her next is…?”

“The next morning, for the sunburn.”

“Sunburn?” Dr. Warmblood said, laughing again as she said it, as if she thought she were being put on. “It’s hard enough to get that in the summertime!”

“She’d been traveling, hadn’t she? It was a serious sunburn. I saw it myself. It had made her seriously dehydrated. She was very ill at that point, very ill.”

“All right, all right, don’t ruffle your feathers, dove. So how many times have you seen her since?”

“Six.”

Azrael glanced at Lan, who found an interesting spot on the spotless wall to investigate.

“She presents the same symptoms every time,” the dead doctor was saying, his tone making it clear what he thought of them. “Apart from the sunburn itself, I mean, which was speedily healed with the rest and fluids I prescribed. But she keeps coming back with complaints of nausea, indeterminate stomach pains and general nonsense. One day, she’ll be fine and the next, flat on her back, groaning she can’t be moved because our lord, in his infinite wisdom, granted her his full authority during his absence and she knows her handmaiden can’t do anything but coddle her along.”

“You should have sent for me a long time ago, mate. I would have put a stop to that rubbish. Right! Let’s have a look at her.” The door swung open and in she came with a broad smile that went crooked the moment she clapped eyes on Lan. “Good gracious, you look horrid.”

“Thanks.”

The doctor took a penlight out of her pocket and came over to the chair where Lan sat, but she was in no hurry to turn it on and shine it around. Her gaze instead moved slowly over Lan’s head. “What’s happened to your hair, lovey?”

“Bad day at the salon. It’ll grow out.”

Dr. Warmblood reached up and ran one hand over Lan’s scalp from her browline all the way to her neck. When she brought her hand back, there was an awful lot of hair winding through her fingers, but Lan hadn’t felt any pull free. “This started with a sunburn, eh?” she said, no longer smiling. “Where?”

“Kind of all over, but it’s all gone now.”

“Under your clothes?”

“Yeah,” said Lan, surprised.

“Where have you been, my dear? Since the purge?”

“France.”

“Nowhere else? Recently?”

Lan glanced at Azrael. “Can’t think of anywhere special,” she said vaguely.

The doctor nodded, accepting the lie but obviously not buying into it even for a penny. “Upset tum, you say?” she asked cheerfully, pulling Lan’s mouth open and shining the light down her gob.

“Uh-huh.”

“Worse in the mornings,” Azrael said pointedly.

“Huh-uh,” Lan said, annoyed.

Dr. Warmblood merely nodded again and let her close her mouth. “Diarrhea?”

Lan looked uncomfortably at the others in the room. “A bit loose, maybe.”

“Headache? Joints ache? Feel heavy or unusually tired?”

Lan shrugged and nodded. “All of that, sure. Comes and goes. Mostly I’m fine.”

“Bruises? Rashes? Sores?”

“A few,” said Lan, picking up her skirts to show some of the more presentable ones off.

Dr. Warmblood immediately bent to have a better look. “Where’d you get them, lovey? Do you know?”

“Sure I know, I…uh…jumped out of a car.”

Azrael sighed and covered his eyes.

“It wasn’t going very fast.”

Dr. Warmblood nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable excuse. “But the worst has been the tum, yes?”

“Yeah, but like I say, just off and on.”

“And it wasn’t a problem for you in France?”

“No, of course not. I’m no hothouse flower.”

“Of course not.” Dr. Warmblood smiled at her, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “I’m going to draw a little blood, lovey. Not a lot, you’ll never miss it. Just want to have a wee peekaboo under the microscope. Dr. Deadhead, if you’d do the honors?”

“Certainly, but I really don’t see—”

“You will. Oh trust me, you will.”

Lan lay back, resigned, and stuck her arm out. A needle was produced. She was swabbed, pinched, stuck, and bandaged.

“Sit tight, babies,” Dr. Warmblood called, leaving. “This won’t take long at all. Dr. Deadhead? If you’ll come with me, please. You’ll want to see this.”

The dead doctor gave Lan’s arm a reassuring pat and followed his colleague out.

“All right,” said Lan, once they were alone. “What is it you think I’ve got?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t.”

“Lan.”

“I don’t!” she insisted, trying to laugh, but too prickly to really pull it off.

He gazed at her for a long time, smiling but in a strange, sad-eyed way. Then he reached out without speaking and put his hand on her belly.

She looked at it, at him, at it some more. Her heart lurched. “Oh bloody hell,” she heard herself say numbly. “No, not a chance.”

“It’s all right, Lan.”

“It’s not all right, because it’s not happening! It absolutely is not! You!” She bounced a fist off his chest and clapped both hands to her face. “You utter bastard! How could you do this to me?”

One split brow rose. “I didn’t.”

Her jaw dropped, then clenched tight. “If you say it isn’t yours, I’ll knock you on your ass, mate.”

“I cannot sire children, Lan.”

“How do you know?”

The question seemed to take him aback. “I…I never have.”

“What the hell does that prove?! How many times have you tried?”

He had to stop and think about it. There was a clock on the wall. It ticked.

“Seventeen thousand, four hundred and eleven.”

It gave her pause, but only a short one. “It only takes once,” she insisted.

The door opened. Dr. Deadhead looked in. His expression was not one of congratulations for a proud papa-to-be. “My lord.”

Azrael tried to stroke her hair. She twisted away from him. He settled for squeezing her arm instead and went out.

Lan sat on the bed, still hugging her stomach, which was now flipping around inside her. She was not pregnant. She couldn’t be. She’d been with no one in France, not even once, not even Henri on a cold night when the loneliness had her in hooks. The last man before Azrael had been on the way to Haven, now nearly two years ago. So it had to be his, if she was pregnant, which she wasn’t, because please dear God she could not be pregnant. She’d be a lousy mother. She had a foul mouth and loose morals and stabbed hairdressers with scissors. She should not have children. She shouldn’t even be allowed near them.

Nothing was happening. The whole world had stopped. Only the clock on the wall was still working and the ticking was driving her mad.

Lan slid off the bed and went to the door. Her heart hammering in her ears and her eyes, of all places, she gripped the latch and carefully, silently, opened it a crack. She listened.

“…must have drunk the water or…or even just walked through,” the living doctor was saying. “It would have only taken a few days or even a few hours. There are places—huge blasts of land—along the path your lordship took here that will still be hot a hundred years from now, as I’m sure you knew.”

“No,” said Azrael. At least, it had to be Azrael, but his voice was strange, hoarse and hollow. “No, I didn’t know. What…” A long silence followed, underscored by a leathery scraping sound—Azrael rubbing at his scars. “How…sick is she?”

Sick? Oh, thank heavens, she was only sick. Lan sagged against the door, so relieved that at first the doctor’s words made no impact on her at all:

“She’s dying.”

“No.”

Lan honestly wasn’t sure whether she said that or only heard it until Azrael said it again.

“No.”

“My lord—”

“I say no. You…do something. Fetch my other consorts,” Azrael ordered in a stronger tone. “Give her blood. Drain every drop of them, if you must, but—”

“That won’t help.”

“What, then?” Azrael demanded, almost in a roar. A short silence, cut into pieces by the pounding of Lan’s heart. He said it again, softly. “What, then?”

“My lord, I can do nothing.”

“And you?”

Lan could almost see Dr. Warmblood’s shrug. “I can send her off now, before it gets too bad.”

“Unacceptable.”

“All right,” Dr. Warmblood said evenly. “We’ll trot her ‘round to hospital and start treatments. A bit of blue dye and DTPA to collect some of the particles that might still be swimming around in her system. Potassium iodide, if there’s any to be found, to help clean it out of her thyroid. And while I’m doing that, you comb through and find everything, anything, that came in with her and get rid of it. Clothes, shoes, treasured photograph of her dear great-aunt Mavis, everything. If she came in a car, bury it. If she was with anyone, including your lordship, send them to me for decontamination.”

“And this will cure her?”

“No. But it’ll give her a few more weeks.”

“Weeks?”

“Maybe a month. No more than two…and you really don’t want her longer than that. Forgive me for being blunt, your lordship, but you need to understand exactly what you’re prolonging. Say we pull out all the stops for her. We can slow the progression and treat most of her symptoms. Her appetite should improve. She’ll put a little weight back on and that will help. Her hair will keep falling out, but it’s only hair, eh? She won’t feel too badly, that’s the important thing. The headaches and nausea will come and go, but overall, she’ll seem to improve. In the meantime, the tissues of her mouth, throat, stomach and bowels will continue to die and inevitably break down. That ‘sunburn’ you saw will come back with open sores that will suppurate and eventually slough off. She’ll bruise over nothing, just wake up with great black bruises over her whole chest or back or thigh and the blood will just sit there in her body and turn septic. She’ll bleed—”

“Enough.”

“She’ll bleed,” the doctor said, more firmly. “Her gums, her nose, her ears, her rectum. And the vomiting will get worse and worse until she’s sicking up her own stomach lining and shitting out her bowels.”

“Enough!”

“Yes,” Dr. Warmblood said softly. “It is enough. Believe me, it is. Even if this was forty years ago and she were in the best hospital in the world, it makes no difference. She was exposed to severe radiation and she is going to die. How soon and how badly is all you get to decide.”

Lan opened the door.

They all looked at her.

Azrael was first to move, although he did no more than extend an arm toward her. “I did not know.”

“Oh, I know,” she assured him, trying to smile. “How could you? It’s not the sort of thing you’d notice. Or Deimos or Serafina. I mean, I’m the one that should have figured it out. There were signs up all around the wall warning folk to keep out. I should have thought harder about why instead of looking at the pictures painted over them. And the dog died, you know. Phobos. That really should have been a clue. It was all there to see, if only…if only I’d known…”

“If it’s any consolation, it wouldn’t have changed the final chapter any,” Dr. Warmblood broke in, not unsympathetically. “Sorry and all that, but it is what it is and it’s time to think about what you’re doing next.”

“Begin the treatments,” Azrael ordered.

“No,” said Lan.

Azrael didn’t argue with her. He turned to the doctors instead. “Take her—”

“I said, no. This is my life. I’m not going to die like that.” The word caught in her throat; she choked on it a little, then spat it up like a fishbone. “How can you want me to die like that?”

The dead doctor caught the live one by the sleeve and towed her quickly back down the hall as Azrael came close and folded her into his arms and Lan was dying. She’d gone from pregnant to dying that fast. She had a month, maybe two. What a word that was, maybe. She had this giant maybe looming over her and she was going to spend it puking up blood and peeling off skin. Her hair would fall out, her teeth. She would wither and rot in her own skin and what was left at the end wouldn’t even be recognizable as human, let alone as Lan.

“I won’t wait,” she said, almost steadily. “I won’t die like that. If you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself, but I won’t die like that.”

“Lan, don’t talk this way.” He cupped her face between his rough hands and made her look at him. “Please, go with the doctors. Let them help you.”

“They can’t help me, damn it! Weren’t you listening? It’s not helping if I’m only staying alive to get worse! Is that how you want me?” she demanded, pulling free of him and at once falling back against the wall, her shaking legs no longer enough to hold her. “You have to want the time you have. Is that what I’m supposed to want? Is that what you want for me?”

His eyes flared, flames spitting out through the sockets, before their light died almost entirely away. “No.”

“It’s not like…like there’s even a chance! If there was a chance, it would be different, but there’s not! Call me a coward, I don’t care! But I can’t…I can’t do this…” And just like that, she was crying. With each shuddering breath, she slipped further down the wall until she was on the floor, hugging onto her bent knees and pulling herself into a tighter knot, like death was something she could hide from if she was just small enough. “I can’t,” she sobbed as Azrael knelt before her and pulled her, resisting, against him. “Not for one lousy month!”

“Give me this time, my Lan, I pray you.” He touched her arm, her cheek, her hair, and folded her into his arms. “And if you cannot give me all, then give me all you can. How can you leave me tonight? How, when I have had only hours back in your arms? We’re supposed to have…at least a little time.”

She wanted to argue, but there were no arguments left to make. She could only shake her head, crying hard against his shoulder. Tears slipped from her skin to his and were lost in his scars.

“I know you are afraid. I know. You fear the pain, the weakness. You fear the threshold of the unknown. But these are all so temporary, my Lan. Do not let the fear you feel tonight rob you of all your tomorrows. Remember…” His hand moved to her throat, tracing the scar there from end to end before gripping her chin and forcing her head back so that she had to look at him, see him. “Life is precious,” he murmured. “All the more when it is ending.”

He kissed her. He tasted bitter. She wondered, did she?

“Wait for rain. It’s a beautiful night, cool and clear. If you could only see it from here, you’d know you could never die under such a painted sky. Wait for rain.” He tried to smile. “It’s not a long wait in this accursed country, is it? And it has to rain, Lan. It has to rain as hard as it can before I let you leave me. Please. Say you’ll wait.”

“For rain,” she whispered.

He smoothed her tears away. “For rain.”

She did not promise, but she lay her head against his shoulder and let him hold her. Whether that would be enough for the next maybe month, she didn’t know, but it was enough for now.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The doctor took her to hospital and kept her there for days. She had to have shots. She had to take pills. She had to drink nasty drinks. And it did help, as far as that went. She stopped being sick in the mornings. Most mornings, anyway. The pain subsided. She slept better. She gained a little weight. The bruises she’d acquired escaping from her appointments first darkened, then faded…then darkened again. Her scrapes closed and opened, closed and opened, but never healed. Her hair kept falling out, so to prove it was only hair, Lan cut it all off and shaved it clean during her first unsupervised moment. Serafina lost her damn mind when she saw her, but Azrael merely cupped her naked head between his hands and kissed her cold scalp and took her home to bed.

Back in the palace, her time passed in a restless blur of inactivity. She tried not to feel like she was waiting, but she was and every day that passed, no matter how spent, was gone forever. If she stayed in, she felt as though she’d wasted one of a precious store of days and the guilt was more than she could bear, but when she went out, her eyes could only see things in terms of the first or the last time she would ever see them, and the grief was as piercing as the guilt. There was nothing so mundane she could not feel its loss if she thought she might never have it again. Every dress she wore—even the hated blue dress with the itchy sleeves and squeezing corset—was every moment she’d ever had while wearing it. When the servants changed the linens, she thought, ‘I will never sleep on those sheets again,’ and cried like she thought she’d miss them, even if they were ugly. Meals were worst, because everything already tasted so wrong; she’d had her last lemon cake, her last lamb chop, even her last nasty cup of wine, and had never known it.

She still saw the doctor every day, still had the shots and swallowed the pills, but they helped less and less as time went by. Inexorably, she went from having a few bad days to having a few good ones. Then her conditions for what made a ‘good’ day began to shift just so she could keep having them. There would always be pain, so the dull ache in her belly became her new normal and the cramps that only ripped through her now and then became her symptoms. As long as she didn’t have new bruises, the old ones didn’t count. When Azrael asked how she felt, she could tell him she was fine as long as she’d only been sick in the morning, and he believed her because it was the truth, by her new standards.

She thought the hardest part would be dealing with the pity, but she met none. The dead lacked the capacity to feel much of anything and pity least of all. Even Serafina cared only about what the process of Lan’s dying was doing to her complexion and although she seemed peripherally aware that Lan had a good reason for all the rivers she was crying, she couldn’t quite mask her annoyance at having to repaint Lan’s face whenever she finished. The doctor was the only living person with whom Lan had any day-to-day contact and she expressed her sympathies best with a little bottle that had three pills in it, all different kinds. “Take them together,” was her compassionate advice. “Empty stomach is best, but if you’ve got to have a drink, have just the one so you don’t sick ‘em up again.”

Lan put the bottle under the mattress on her side of the bed initially, then brought it out and set it on the nightstand, where it was the last thing she saw before sleep and the first thing she saw on waking. When the cramps clawed through her or she found a bruise she couldn’t account for or saw blood in the chamberpot, it comforted her to know the pills were there. On bad days, she liked to hold the bottle. On very bad days, she opened it and held the pills in her palm. At first, it was only for a second or two, just long enough to feel their little weight and smell their slight, medicinal smell. As her other comforts became harder to find, those stolen moments drew out into longer and longer spans of time, until inevitably, Azrael walked in on her.

She could have palmed them. She didn’t. After a short, tense silence, he came over to the bed and sat beside her.

“Is it dinnertime?” she asked listlessly, rolling pills beneath her fingertip. “I don’t think I can eat.”

“It’s early yet. But it’s a fair afternoon. I thought you might like to have a walk with me.”

“Is it sunny? The light…bothers me.”

“No. It’s warm, but overcast. It may rain later.” He took her hand, curling her fingers into a protective shell over the pills before he kissed it. “Walk with me, before it comes.”

So they walked, away from the palace and down along the riverfront as far as she could go before she had to rest. They watched the water as the sun sank behind the thickening clouds, then made careful love as the failing lights of Haven came on. The first drops fell on her back as she lay against him afterwards and, with his eyelight dim on her bare skin, she reached into the swaddles of her gown nearby and found the pill bottle.

She held it loosely in her grip. He held her tight in his.

“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 breakfast?” 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.

“I know,” Azrael said and oddly, he seemed to say it with genuine sympathy, but that was all he did.

“What are we waiting for?”

“It’s being prepared. Patience.”

She sighed and threw herself back in her spindly little chair and watched the rain wash down. “You could at least talk to me,” she muttered.

“No, Lan. I don’t think I can.”

The door to the kitchen whooshed open and in came Azrael’s steward, carrying a tray with a single covered dish on it. It was the first time Lan had ever seen him actually carry anything, as opposed to flapping his hands at a servant, and he did it with such an overinflated impression of consequence that she just knew whatever was under that dome was only just this side of food. Nonetheless, she leaned forward as he set the tray before her, not only resigned but eager to eat her way through a plate of gold-dusted truffles or fish eggs on toast as long as she got to eat something.

Azrael’s steward whisked the tray’s cover away to reveal a coffee service. Cream, sugar, plenty of flavorings, but no food, not even biscuits. Oblivious to Lan’s undisguised disappointment, the dead man laid it all out, then tucked the tray up under his arm and bowed once more to the throne. “Will that be all, my lord?”

“It better not be,” Lan muttered, reaching for the carafe.

“For now. Leave us.” Azrael waited for his steward to withdraw, then turned his own cup over and held it out to be filled. “If you would.”

Lan looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t think you liked coffee.”

“Perhaps I never had it prepared properly, by one who had the taste for it.”

Silly thing to get tickled over, but it tickled anyway. Smiling, Lan mixed him up a cup just the way she liked it, cream and sugar with a cinnamon stick to stir it in, and passed it over. As she made one up for herself, she watched him inspect, sniff, and finally sip at it.

“You take it quite sweet,” he remarked.

“Sorry. Things taste wrong to me these days.” She gave her own cup a try, doing her best to mentally filter out that sour tang that was always with her now. It wasn’t the usual blend, she thought. They’d opened up the fancy beans, something flavored, although she couldn’t say with what. Whatever it was, the cinnamon was setting it off. Not in a bad way, maybe, but definitely a different way. “It’s not terrible, is it?”

“No.” He had another swallow, as if to prove it, then promptly made himself a liar by topping off his cup and thinning out the sugar. Before she could apologize again, he said, “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. Everything. I want to hear your voice.” He had more coffee, not drinking so much as pouring it into his body, and gazed at the dead plant in the bowl before him. “I need to hear your voice.”

Lan’s life hadn’t all been misery and toil, but neither had it provided her with oceans of fond memories. She sipped at her coffee, considering and dismissing fragments of her life.

“Lan?”

“My mother and I grew peaches,” she began and so it went on from there. She told him of long days working in the greenhouse, of soil and sweat and the mud it made in every crease of her body, of the way the taste of peaches changed once you’d bled for them. Talk of the greenhouse invariably turned into talk of the Goode twins, whose rows little Lan and her mother had to work before they could even start to work their own, and that led to talk of Mother Muggs, who saw them off each morning and took them in each night, and that somehow led to the Fairchilds. She told him of feeding the mayor’s livestock and scrubbing his wife’s kitchen and then, to her very vague alarm, she heard herself telling him about Eithon, he of the blue eyes and winning smile, before he turned into groping hands and stomping feet and bones wrapped in weathered clothes hanging from Norwood’s broken wall.

That these were bad memories gradually occurred to her, but the line between good and bad had thinned and blurred considerably since starting to talk. She tried to think of better ones, but for some reason, she was having trouble pinning one down. She would start one story and somehow end on another with no memory of the chain that had led her there. Azrael asked questions whenever she lost the trail of her thoughts and kept her cup filled, but he didn’t seem to be listening to her stories as much as just her voice. The more she stumbled in the telling, getting stuck on simple words and repeating others, the quieter and more watchful he became.

As her focus eroded, she found herself telling him things she had no business telling anyone and him least of all—of crying into the warm side of the mayor’s cow on the day of the harvest ball because she knew no one would ask her, of stealing food out of the slop bucket on her way to feed the mayor’s pigs, of that first sight of her mother staggering back to the wall in her bare feet, of the sheriff and his tax—and in between, she told him how Lisah Tuttle’s hair was always clean and full of curls, of the time Mal Henri took her down to the fairgrounds in Anglais-en-Port to see the traveling show and buy her a glace (she lapsed unknowing into French when she spoke of him, and Azrael answered in kind), of Master Wickham taking her to damn near every chimney in Haven because she’d told him once she liked them.

She stopped only to catch her breath, fragments of ten thousand stories tumbling like snow through her mind and melting into a single puddle, then suddenly said, “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

He poured the last bit of his drink into hers and said, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. If this is the last time, I don’t want you to remember me babbling like a fool for hours on end over nothing. I want you to remember me the good ways. There were good ways,” she interrupted herself anxiously, “weren’t there? It wasn’t all fighting and fucking, was it?”

“No.”

“I keep thinking of my mother. You know my best memory of her? The first time she took me hunting. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I remember how heavy the rifle was and how it knocked me on my ass the first time I fired it, but I hit a coney on my first shot and I hit three more before we went back. She clapped my shoulder and called me her girl. I never again saw her smile so broad as that, never in my life much less when she was looking at me. It was as good as hearing her say she loved me, which I never heard, ever. And that’s it,” Lan said, sneaking a little more cream into her coffee. “Everything she ever did with me, everything she ever said…and that’s the best memory she left me. Shooting coneys. Do you think she meant for that to happen? No. She thought she had time. Her last words to me were all about reminding me we owed Posey Goode an extra hour for some buttons and to pick up the bacon Pat Morgan promised her. If she’d known those were her last words, I’m sure they’d have been different, don’t you think? I have,” she said without giving him a chance to answer or even quite remembering there had been a question, “a golden opportunity here. I know I’m dying. I know this could be my last night. These could be my last words—”

His eyes flickered.

“—and what am I saying, eh? Piss and skittles, that’s what. I love you. That’s what matters. That’s what you’re supposed to remember forever and ever. I love you and I don’t want to leave. You were all my best days…and most of my worst ones, too, but that’s all right. The worst ones weren’t any worse than they might have been with anyone else, but the best ones were so much better. I love you.”

The rain fell on the windows. Azrael seemed to be waiting for something and the more time passed without it, the more unsteady his eyelight became. At last, he raised a hand—caught between the flickering of his eyes and the guttering candles, it seemed to shake—and covered them.

“What’s wrong?” Lan asked. “I mean…you know…what else?”

“Why haven’t you asked me, Lan?” His voice, strained by emotion, scarcely rose above a whisper, but she felt it all the same—not in her ears, but in her bones—filling her with black light. “I know it’s wrong and I should refuse even so, but if you love me as you say, should you not want to stay? All this time, all these terrible days…you have not asked me.”

“Oh.” She petted uncomfortably at one of the flowers and accidentally plucked out a petal. After trying several seconds to reattach it, she remembered that was not how flowers worked and buried it in the sand of its pot instead.

“Lan. Please. Our time is running out and I need to know why.”

“I didn’t want to start another fight,” she said, sighing. “I mean, this is it, isn’t it? If you don’t want me—”

His shielding hand made a fist and dropped with a bang to the table. “How can you say that?”

“Because you don’t. Not raised up, I mean. I know you want me alive,” she assured him, reaching out to pat his rigid arm. “It’s just the dead me you’re afraid of fucking up.”

He dropped his gaze and stared instead at her hand on his arm.

“And I reckon I’m a little afraid of it, too,” she admitted. “Maybe not for the same reasons, but I’m afraid. As much as you don’t want to look at me someday and see a mistake you made…that’s how much I don’t want to look at you and see you regretting it. Regretting me.”

He looked away. The rain fell. The ugly plant with his blood smeared on the side dropped a leaf.

“Well.” Lan took her hand back and morosely picked up her coffee. “It’s too late now anyway.”

He watched her drink, his face drawn and strained.

“I mean, look at me. You know, I really didn’t mean it when I offered that one time before. I only put it up as barter against the Eaters, because it was what I thought you wanted most.”

“I know.”

“But I distinctly remember thinking…thinking…” Lan frowned, groping through her memories for one that had been clear as diamonds just seconds ago. She started to have another drink and maybe the caffeine helped, because at the first sip, she suddenly found it. “Ah! Thinking it was the best time!”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean…” What did she mean? “To kill me. To raise me up. It was the best time. It was the best…” She floundered, patting mutely at her chest before she found the right word. “…me!”

He poured her more coffee. “Tell me why.”

Lan winced elaborately and spooned more sugar into her cup. “Well, don’t think less of me, but really, why would anyone choose to be twenty just once and sixty forever? Yeah, I know they say that age is just a state of mind, but I’ve seen old people and it looks to me like the knees got a lot to do with it, too. If my eyes went bad or I got the rheumatiz, is that my new forever? What the hell kind of prize is that, seriously? For either of us! Say I live on another fifty years before I die and you raise me up. What do you get but to look at my wrinkles and saggy bits for all eternity?”

His answer was to touch one cracked claw to the uppermost edge of the scar that cut across his face and follow it down, over his fiery eye, along the open hole in his cheek, lightly scraping over the exposed bone of his jaw, and on down his neck until the wound closed again over his breast. “There are worse sights.”

“You’ll heal, if you ever get the chance. But that night? That was the best I’ll ever be.” She glanced awkwardly down at herself, at the ruin of a body that was never all that fair to begin with. Serafina was right; she didn’t look half as bad as she had before the treatments, but it was a farmer’s body still, one that showed the work she’d done with it in every callus and scar. Its lines were unpolished; its color, uneven. “Look at me now,” she said, testing the firmness of her own small breast. “Just look at me now.”

He touched a claw to her chin and brought her gaze up through swimming headspace and shadow to meet his too-bright eyes. “I see you,” he said softly. “As you were. As you are. And they are one.”

“And isn’t that funny?” said Lan, slurring her words a little as she laughed along with them. “You’re the only one who knows what I really look like. And I’m the only one who knows what you really look like. Like…like did you know your eyes have colors?”

His brows rose slightly and slowly furrowed. “No. What colors?”

“Greens, mostly. Some greys and browns. A little blue. You have to look for it. Under the white. You know, people think white is no color, but in your eyes, it’s like it’s all colors. Every…possibility. I love your eyes,” she told him, nodding. “In the dark especially. I love…this.” She raised her hand, the one without the coffee in it, and cupped it as if to catch his eyelight, although he was still seated beside her and not lying behind her in the dark. She stared into her palm anyway, seeing the reflection of light that wasn’t there. “I hope it’s not dark where I’m going. Do you think…do you think…”

“No, Lan,” he said, smoothing away tears she had not yet realized she was leaking. “You won’t be lost in the dark.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, but was it? She couldn’t remember, so she laughed to cover the embarrassment she probably did not feel as strongly as she ought to. The sound struck her ear oddly; she knew it was shrill and ought to be jarring, but by the time it reached her ear, it had mellowed out to something that was just odd. Like the room, she decided, looking around. The candles that should be too bright, the hall that should be too big, the flowers that really should be too flowery—it had been all of these things when she first entered the room and she suspected it still was, but she couldn’t see it that way anymore. It almost felt like being drunk, only without the swimming head, or like falling asleep, except without being tired. In fact, the more she thought about it, the harder it was to think about it. She looked down into her coffee cup and laughed again. “I feel funny. What did you spike this with?”

It was a joke. He didn’t smile. He said, “Adenia,” and poured the last of the coffee from the pot into her cup.

“Oh.” She peered at the ugly plants decorating the table, but could not quite bring them all the way into focus. “Master Wickham said…said you could eat a lot of flowers, but I didn’t…” The thought slipped away. She groped for it, said, “…plant them…” then gave up and let it go. She picked up her cup, using both hands, and brought it miles through the air to her lips. She drank and winced; she’d forgotten to add cream and sugar.

Azrael leaned toward her, steadying the cup as she tried to push it away.

“It’s bitter,” she protested.

“Yes.” He cupped the back of her neck, helping her to drink the rest. “It always is.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she laughed again. She had trouble catching her breath afterwards. She wasn’t panting or anything, it just didn’t seem that important to keep breathing, but other than that, she felt just fine. When he said, “Come here, Lan. Sit here with me,” she had no trouble at all getting up from her chair and going to his.

She sat on his lap and he put his arms around her and pulled her close against his chest.

“Here is where you leave me, Lan,” he whispered, stroking the smooth curve of her head the way he used to stroke her hair. “And if I were a better man, I would let you go, even where I cannot follow, to have that perfect peace I can never share. If I loved you as you surely deserve to be loved, I would bury you in some good place and set a stone above you that reads Here she lies whom God alone shall raise up. And I would grieve and go on alone.”

The words, like the rain, dropped and slid away without ever touching her, but his face as he said them made her sad. She reached up through fathoms of thick distance and touched his cheek. He lay his hand over hers and that was okay. She smiled.

His hand slipped up to cup her head and pull her close enough to kiss, but he didn’t. “I am not that man,” he said, his lips just brushing hers on every word. “Forgive me for what I am about to do, my Lan. Forgive me. I have been alone too long to be noble now.”

She shut her eyes against the heat of his and nodded once, because although the words themselves floated through her largely without meaning, the sound of his voice was soothing. She thought she might sleep now, although she wasn’t tired, so she didn’t bother to open her eyes again.

He finally kissed her. Just once. Like the wax stamp on a royal edict, like the seal on a promise, and no more. He did not speak again, or if he did, it did not penetrate the growing darkness that filled her where her breath ought to be, but he did hold her. That much, she could still feel. He held her until she slept.

* * *

It seemed to Lan that she did not sleep long, but when Azrael said her name, she woke at once to find the room lit only by his eyes. The candles had burned to stumps trailing wax in ribbons all down their fine holders to the table. The rain fell on dark windows. Lan herself lay in an awkward sprawl across Azrael’s lap—her head lolling and arms dangling over one side of the throne, her left leg kicked up over the other and the right resting on the floor. Her gown’s laces had come loose (or been cut, knowing him), leaving her chest in an exposed state that was, if not indecent, certainly immodest.

Bewildered (but not groggy, as she so often was these days when she woke up), Lan gave her bodice a tug and took a deep breath to brace herself against the exhausting effort it would take to right herself. But when she found a gripping place on Azrael’s broad shoulders, she sat up without any struggle at all. Even Azrael’s hand on her back was only a guide, not a support. She probably could have stood right away, if she wanted. Instead, she tucked her legs up and settled herself more comfortably within the confines of his throne, resting her head against his shoulder and closing her eyes again. His arms enfolded her, holding her in silence. She did not doze; she wasn’t tired.

Outside, the rain hit the windows. Inside, Azrael’s breath blew over the naked top of her head and his heart slushed and thumped against her ear.

“Reckon we’ve missed dinner,” Lan said at last, although it was hard to drum up much regret. Whatever appetite she’d had on entering this room was gone now. She wasn’t feeling nauseous, for a happy change, she just wasn’t hungry anymore. “Want to go to bed?”

“In a moment.”

She drew back at once, not liking the strained quiet of his voice and liking the near-lightless quality of his eyes even less. “What’s wrong?”

He searched her face in silence for a short time, then said, still in that same taut, roughened way, “How do you feel, Lan?”

“Fine,” she replied automatically, then stopped to think about it. She did feel fine. And fine was something she hadn’t felt in a very long while. It wasn’t just her tender tum that had calmed. The dull cramps that had shadowed the intermittent nausea had gone as well. No headache. No muscle aches. No pain of any kind. She wasn’t tired, wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty. Even the unwholesome chill of Azrael’s flesh seemed subdued—present, but perfectly tolerable.

Lan hitched up her skirts at once and stared in confusion at a leg that had been pocked with bruises mere moments ago, or so her mind insisted. Now it was whole. Pale, but whole. She touched the place on the side of her shin where a sore the size of a goldslip had been open and hot with infection just that morning and could not feel so much as a dimple or see even the pink blotch of scarring.

But it was only dead flesh he had the power to mend.

She stared at him.

He gazed back at her.

“But I’m breathing,” she said finally. It was all she could think to say.

For answer, he reached up and lay his hand over her mouth, gently pinching off her nostrils. His expression never changed.

She waited, blinking and looking foolishly around as if someone were about to pop up from under the table to point and laugh at her before explaining how the trick was done. But there was no trick. She wasn’t breathing and her lungs didn’t mind a bit because she didn’t need to breathe. She probably didn’t need to blink either.

Azrael removed his hand.

Lan started breathing again, out of habit. Hesitantly, she made herself stop. Then started again, not because she had to but just because not needing to was so disturbing. As he watched, she pulled up her sleeve and gave herself a cautious pinch. It hurt a little, but didn’t leave a mark. “I don’t feel any different,” she said tentatively.

“You aren’t.”

“But I’m…I’m…”

“Apart from that.”

She sat back on his lap, trying without success to gather in her scattered thoughts, then reached up and felt around on the side of her neck for her pulse.

Azrael waited with her as seconds slipped away into minutes.

She felt at the other side of her neck and encountered the raised, unlovely line of her scar. Startled, she looked at him.

“I’ll mend it, if you wish,” he said.

“Why did you leave it? You took away all the other scars.”

“Because that one…” He reached up to trace it with his fingertips, his voice roughening. “That one is precious to me. But I’ll mend it. If you wish.”

She found the idea of keeping one scar—that one in particular—oddly comforting and started to tell him so, only to fall silent again as a new thought wormed out of the dark and bit deep. Did she find it comforting? Did she really? Or did he?

Her hand strayed down over his chest to pluck at the buckle of his belt. “Tell me to take this off.”

His eyes flickered, but not with confusion. There was no passion in his voice when he said, “Unclothe me.”

“No.”

He nodded, his expression unchanged. “I command it. I command you.”

“No,” she said again and sat, tapping her forefinger now and then against the buckle, as she waited to feel whatever overwhelming compulsion the dead felt when their lord’s will lay over them.

Azrael waited with her, one hand at the small of her back to steady her as she perched on his lap and the other rasping lightly over her scar. “I cannot be your lord and your lover both,” he told her when she looked down at him at last. “And you could not be my Lan were you not free to leave me.”

There was more he tried to say then, but she silenced him with her kiss.

His hands flexed, claws digging at her skin in ten distinct points of almost-pain, pulling her hard against him. She could feel the heat of his eyes—not so hot as it had been—and the chill of his flesh—not so cold—and the raised line of every scar crushed between them in ways she never had before. The clarity to which she had been awakened made every sensation new and exhilarating. The least touch brought her nerves to vibrant life; she could feel the split in his lip when he brushed it across her jaw, the scrape of his sharp teeth, the ragged burn of his breath when he groaned her name, right before he pushed her back.

“No,” he said, just like she wasn’t right there on his lap to feel all the ways the rest of him screamed ‘yes’. “You need time. You need—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know what I need. Come here.” She took his face firmly between her hands to prevent escape and kissed him again, slowly, relaxing into his hungry embrace and resenting every slip of fabric that kept them separate. “Oh, I’ve missed this,” she breathed into his mouth. “I’ve felt so bad so long, I forgot how it’s supposed to be. I taste you. All the little ways you taste. The way you used to taste before…well, before.” She licked at his lips, then at his chin, then fastened her mouth to his and swirled her tongue along his before drawing back with a frown. “Am I all right?”

His answer was to yank her into another kiss, but it was unclear who was the conqueror and who the claimed. If he brushed her lips, she bruised his; she nibbled, he bit; he explored, she invaded. With every fresh assault, she could feel the barriers between them weaken until, with a savage snarl, he rose up, lifting her with him and setting her hard on the table, clearing it with a sweep of his arm and a crash of broken porcelain. He lay her down, his hands tearing away his clothes and hers, his mouth like heaven and hell together wherever it moved.

Her heart couldn’t race and her breath didn’t catch, but in every way that mattered, it was just the way it used to be. Her body was a stranger’s, shocking her with the power of its responses. Every touch was a trigger to far greater rush of sexual frisson. His claws pricking at her thighs as he pulled her legs around his hips, the silver rings on his side tapping to the rhythm they made between them, his chin just brushing at her jaw as he moved his mouth from her breast to kiss the scar on her neck—all were needful, all were bliss. It was pleasure in its purest form, unencumbered by trivialities like stamina or strain, and the more she took, the more she was herself consumed.

Their bodies came together, but they remained separate for a while, each one trapped in their own world of sensation and desire. Gradually, her greed and his urgency subsided and pleasure grew to include the other. His fevered thrusts slowed and gentled, her desperate clutches became caresses, and although he did fling the last surviving pot of flowers to a shattering death on the tiles when his arm encountered it, the hand he put on her afterward was tender.

“My Lan,” he groaned, quiet thunder she felt all the way through to her bones. “My light. My life. My lover. With me, now. With me.”

And she died, one more time, and the light that took her as she came back was dark no longer, but blinding white and full of colors, like his eyes.

She lay beneath him in the quiet that followed that receding tide, thinking nothing, but only feeling. When he tried to rise, she pulled him back and held on until he settled atop her. Strange, to feel his weight but not be crushed by it.

Maybe Azrael counted the hours that passed as they lay together amid broken garlands of ivy and spilled sugar, but Lan didn’t even try. She knew how long they’d been there only when the sky outside the windows began to lighten. As the yellow-grey dawn crept into the room with them, Lan finally asked the question that had been growing more and more unavoidable since the last shudder of his body into hers: “Are we going to break this table if we go again?”

Azrael grunted against her shoulder and gave an experimental rock. Although she was not in a position to see him smile, she could feel it curve against her skin and hear it in his voice when he said, “Probably.”

“Reckon you should take me to bed then, because I’m not tired.”

He shifted, but when he drew back enough to see her face, both the smile and the light of his eyes had faded. “You’ll never again be tired, Lan. You’ll never again sleep.”

She’d never blush again either, and she was glad of it, because this would be the time. She knew perfectly well the dead didn’t sleep, but she guessed it would be a while before she knew all the way through that she was one of them now. She looked up at Azrael without flinching, meaning to tell him it didn’t matter and she never remembered her dreams anyway, but said instead, without planning, “I’m glad we had the once, then.”

“So am I.” He brushed at the side of her head with the backs of his knuckles, smoothing back hair she’d never grow again. “Lan…”

“I’m all right,” she said, before he could ask. “I will be, anyway. Will you? I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

She said it, knowing there was no good answer, not ‘Yes, it is,’ and certainly not, ‘No, it really isn’t,’ but he did not hesitate.

“I’ve wanted you all my life, Lan. All my life.”

She stared up at him, now almost sort of wishing she could still blush. “Right,” she said, not quite steadily, and put her arms around him. “We’re going to break this table.”

EPILOGUE

The fog rolled in around midnight and only got thicker with the dawn, so that the palace seemed to float in an ocean of white nothing. Nevertheless, as the sun rose somewhere behind the thick clouds, the ferries came. Lan, watching from a high window overlooking the front courtyard, couldn’t hear the rumbling of their engines, but it was eerie enough just to see their headlamps in the mist, disembodied, like glowing eyes, and then the indistinct smudges of their hulking bodies before the fog opened up and they were just vans.

Azrael’s steward came bustling out to meet them, followed in short order by Deimos, who took charge over the steward’s protests. Under his direction, the last residents of Haven were brought out, arranged into groups and loaded for transport. It wouldn’t take long. Most of Haven had evacuated over the summer, when the weather was best for traveling. Those that were left had relocated to the palace so that, for a while, it had been positively bustling, but then those had started trickling away, too. There was hardly anyone left now—just servants to shut up the house, gardeners to put the grounds and the greenhouses to bed, a handful of Revenants to keep watch, and Azrael’s musicians. One must have one’s musicians, after all.

As Lan watched, they appeared, led by Tempo and surrounded on every side by Azrael’s steward, who had nothing much to do with his days anymore but find new ways to be obnoxiously underfoot. They loaded instruments into the largest ferry, more than anyone could possibly need, except that Lan knew they wouldn’t be finding any more on the island that was to be their home. They’d want all they could get, which was only fine and natural, but they had only the one ferry to put them all in, which presented some harsh realities. They struggled half an hour at least with the piano before they finally gave it up. As they wheeled it back inside, the flute-player reached out to clasp Tempo’s slumped shoulder in a brief gesture of sympathy which seemed to be accepted in good grace.

She was the last of the living in Haven, the flute-player. The rest of Azrael’s dollies had all been packed off with enough useless sparkly shit to make them welcome anywhere in the world and hopefully, none of them had even the slightest notion why. As far as they all knew, they were leaving because Lord Azrael no longer had any use for them, and Lan was perfectly happy to let them think she’d talked him into it, although she hadn’t. He was trying to do right by them, that was all, provided that doing right didn’t also mean getting stuck with them on some island well away from the luxuries to which they had become accustomed. Personally, Lan thought Azrael was fooling himself if he didn’t think they’d end up right back here before the year was out, looking to be taken in and taken care of, and no doubt shocked as hell to find the city empty, but then again, they were moving awfully fast now that Felicity and them all were gone, so maybe he wasn’t fooled after all.

As for Heather, she ought to be here still, but once she’d learned of the new place, the girl put the full force of her daughterly wiles toward going there. She and Azrael had been reading Le Morte D’Arthur and for her, any island might be Avalon. Her relentless energy, combined with the growing number of minutiae demanding Azrael’s attention as Haven emptied, ultimately wore him down and he formally relented at the end of summer, sending her away with Dr. Warmblood, her governess, her tutor, and her solemn promise to behave, doubtless broken before she reached the gate. Without her, it was much quieter, which was not entirely a good thing. Lan was a little bemused to discover she actually missed the little blighter and was looking forward to getting her underfoot again almost as much as she was looking forward to finally being in her true home, that new place she had never seen and still yearned for with all her heart.

“My lady?”

Azrael’s steward, come to fidget at her. The ferries below were already starting to drive off—it never took the dead long to get underway and after all the practice they’d had these past months, they had the procedure down with a precision a clock would envy—and Azrael was still nowhere to be seen in the courtyard.

“Where is he?” she asked, smiling.

“He said he didn’t want to be disturbed, you see,” the dead man said, not quite wringing his hands, but clasping them. “He said to inform him at once when the vehicles were charged and ready to depart, and I did. And then he said to inform him as soon as boarding was underway, and I did. And then he said he didn’t want to be disturbed and he went to his morning room.”

“Of course he did,” said Lan, turning away from the window. “Take me to him.”

He did, with obvious relief, leading her through silent halls with boarded up windows on one side and covered over paintings and furniture on the other. The curtains had been taken down and all the rugs rolled up. The grit that walked in on the boots of the few Revenants remaining stayed where it dropped off. There were cobwebs on the hanging lights, autumn leaves in the corners, dust everywhere. If she could see outside, she would see empty greenhouses, their beds bare and machinery quiet. Whatever seed had not already been shipped to the new place had been neatly labeled and placed in storage, along with careful instructions for how to get the fans and irrigation going, if whoever came along wasn’t familiar with electrics and plumbing. The livestock had all been butchered and the breeders shipped on to the new place, their old pens cleaned and in good repair for the next occupants. The outdoor gardens had been trimmed down before the gardeners all left, although they’d grown out quite a bit since then. Anyone who didn’t know better might think the palace already abandoned, but not neglected. Every part of the leaving had been done with a thought for someone’s eventual return, although she knew that didn’t make it any easier for him.

She wished he’d talk to her about it. The nearer they’d come to this day, the more restless and withdrawn he’d become until it was hard enough to get him to talk to her at all. He could deflect any of her clumsy attempts with such finesse that it could be hours later before she realized a simple, “How are you, really?” had somehow turned into an animated lecture on the evolution and domestication of the deerhound and she didn’t even like dogs. Now here they were and all the wordplay in the world couldn’t push this day any further back. It was time to go.

Azrael’s steward brought her to a door and quickly left her, but she could see his shadow linger at the end of the hall after he turned the corner, waiting to be needed when his lord emerged. Sighing (unnecessary now, but so satisfying), Lan opened the door without bothering herself to knock. The room beyond was empty, as they all were these days, but the emptiness was itself of a familiar sort. No paintings to need covering, just a pale lump that might be a single desk with a single chair beneath a sheet, and Azrael in his horned mask before the boarded window, staring into the grain of the wood as if he could see through it and down into his meditation garden, where, in his mind perhaps, the living were planted as flowers and the dead writhed and burned.

He did not look around, but when she shut the door behind her, he said, “Lan. Are they waiting on me?”

“Nope.”

Now he turned.

“They’re leaving without you,” she said lightly, crossing the small room to join him at the window. “Haven’t decided yet whether I will or not, so I thought I’d come ask which you’d prefer.”

He made that low half-growling sound in the back of his throat that he only used when he wanted her to think he was annoyed, but wasn’t really, and offered his arm.

His steward manifested as soon as the jingle of Azrael’s rings were heard in the hall and Lan had to stand for some time as he blustered through a painfully thorough accounting of the last day in Haven, ending on the rather peevish apology that he had no more to report on the matter of the departure, as Captain Deimos had taken it upon himself to oversee it.

“Very good,” Azrael said, not quite without a sigh of his own. “You are relieved of your duties here. We’ll speak again at the dock…at length, I’m sure.”

Lan gave his arm a reproachful squeeze even as she smothered a smile.

“Tell the captain to hold a car for Lan and myself. We’ll be there directly.”

The dead man’s disappointment at not being invited to share that car was evident, but he managed a respectful, “Yes, my lord,” and bowed himself away.

Azrael muttered something in another language that sounded unkind as he watched his steward go, then rubbed up under his mask. When he looked at Lan again, it was with a broad smile that went no deeper than his skin. “I shall miss seeing you in gowns,” he said, gesturing at her traveling togs. His voice matched his smile. “I know you’ve never cared for them, but I found it wondrous to see art worn as clothing, however impractical or uncomfortable, and I regret I shall never see you so attired again.”

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

Also by  R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

Olivia

The Scholomance

Cottonwood

The Last Hour of Gann

Coming Soon!

Pool

Copyright © 2015 by R. Lee Smith

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Purplhouse@gmail.com

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

Content

LAND
OF THE
BEAUTIFUL DEAD
R. Lee Smith

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

EPILOGUE

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