Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “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 mom
ent 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.