Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “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 h
as 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 vo
ice, 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?”