Incarnate n-1

by Jodi Meadows

  I blinked and tried to find where I was in the music. My hands had worked without me, but now that I was paying attention again, I couldn’t remember where I was. I glanced at the end — the coda — just as I played the last chord. Hopefully I hadn’t messed it up too badly. Just because he didn’t say anything didn’t mean he wasn’t listening to every note.

  A prelude was next on the stack of music. It was one of his recent compositions, merely a hundred years old. It was also my favorite so far, because it had a quirky melody all the way through, even the serious parts. Like a private joke.

  He should have been down by the time I reached the end of the prelude — I managed to hit a note I usually missed — but when I let my mitt-clad hands fall to my knees, he wasn’t there. It was a challenging prelude; my success with it should have lured him downstairs. I’d try one more thing, then go up to drag him to the piano bench.

  Music was the only time he seemed normal. Forget what Sine had said about Sam sorting it out on his own. I wanted to help him, so if music was the only thing that made him happy now, I’d try something new.

  There was music in my head, melodies that made me shiver into sleep. Not Sam’s, and not anyone else’s. Mine. I hadn’t told anyone about the music stirring inside of me, but it seemed right that Sam should be the first to know.

  I’d only ever hummed the tune, and only when I was alone. And when no one was looking, I’d played a mute and invisible piano on my lap, or a table, or my desk in my room.

  Here at the real piano, yellowed ivory keys firm beneath my fingertips, there was more pressure for it to sound as perfect as it did in my head.

  Low notes came long and round, deep and mysterious. High notes sang like sylph. If I was honest, it was music of my fears. Shadows made of fire, drowning in a lake, and death without reincarnation. Giving those fears up to music — that helped.

  “Please let it help Sam,” I whispered beneath an arpeggio. “Please let him like it.”

  I played as carefully as I could, focused on each note and the way it resounded across the parlor. Hearing it outside my head made it real. Solid. Was this how Sam felt every time he wrote something new?

  The last note fell. Still no Sam.

  Maybe he hated it.

  I slipped off my fingerless mittens and left them on the bench. Upstairs, the house was quiet. No water gurgling through pipes, no clothes swishing around as if he couldn’t find something he wanted to wear. And when I knocked on his door, no answer. Nor the second or third try. I let myself in.

  Sam sat on the floor, staring blankly at the wall, not moving, hardly breathing. Sweat wormed down his face; it must have itched, but he didn’t brush it away.

  I rushed inside, thumping my knee on the floor as I knelt in front of him. “Sam.”

  Nothing.

  “Sam!” I shook his shoulders, said his name again and again, but he seemed trapped somewhere else. Somewhen else, like when the sylph outside his graveyard had made a dragon head.

  Dragons. That was his fear.

  “Sam, it’s okay.” I cupped my palms over his cheeks, leaned close until the scent of him filled me. “Please. You’re safe.”

  He blinked, and his eyes focused on me. Confusion for a moment, then recognition. “Ana,” he rasped. “What happened?”

  As if I had any clue. “You were just staring when I came in.” I smoothed hair from his face and whispered, “I thought you were gone.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch, and his expression betrayed emotions I had no names for. “Ana.” My name slipped out like he hadn’t meant to say it.

  “You’re safe.” I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to draw out his fears and hide them far away, but it seemed impossible. “Please don’t go away again.”

  Sam hugged me, too tight, shaking like he’d run a thousand leagues. When he loosened enough for me to breathe, I sat sideways on his legs. His heart thudded by my ear as I dragged my hand along the cords of muscle in his arm. Tensed, untensed.

  We sat like that for a while, his face buried in my hair. I didn’t know how else to reassure him, so I continued petting his arm while the quiet lingered, and he seemed to be collecting his thoughts.

  His heartbeat steadied. “I was remembering dragons and all the times—” He sounded like he’d swallowed glass. “I couldn’t stop remembering.”

  I spoke softly so as not to shatter the moment of his confession. “All the times?”

  “All the times dragons killed me.” The words came thick with dread and grief.

  “How many?” I’d assumed it had been only once, which was stupid, and only once would have been enough to give me nightmares forever.

  “Thirty.” He glanced toward the window, though I couldn’t see anything but trees and the tip of the city wall. “If you hadn’t saved me last week, it would have been thirty-one.”

  Thirty dragon deaths. I believed him, but it was so impossible sounding. I just couldn’t grasp it. “I want to know what happened earlier, but I don’t want to ask.” I couldn’t bear to see him like that again.

  He squeezed me. “Most people have triggers, things that send them spiraling into horrible memories. No one goes through any life unscathed. Smell is most subtle, but sound has always done it to me. Never quite like this, though. Sometimes I think you can—”

  I could what? If sound was his trigger and I’d been playing the piano, this was my fault. I’d wanted to help him, but had done the exact opposite. “I’m so sorry.” Now I felt like the one who’d swallowed glass. I leaned away, tried to stand up, but his fingers tangled in my hair and he looked wretched.

  “Don’t go.” His jaw clenched. “It wasn’t you.”

  It didn’t happen all on its own. But when he put his arms around me, like that helped, I let him. This felt nice, the way we curled together. And strange, because I’d wanted to be this close to him — but not like this. Not because he needed someone, and I was handy.

  Then he kissed the top of my head — I tensed all over again — and he acted like there was nothing unusual. This whole thing, it was too much. I wished he would just talk to me. I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

  “Sam.” His skin warmed beneath mine. “I can listen. I want to listen.”

  He turned his hand over to hold mine, silent acknowledgment.

  “Please. For both of us.”

  “It was your music,” he said at last, and his words became a flood. “But not only that. The attack at the market, the way everyone reacted or didn’t. It’s been so long. Everything happened so quickly, and then your music made me feel like I was reliving all those times at once.

  “My first memory is of singing. We’d come to what would be called Range, and everything was perfect. Pure. Hot springs, geysers, mud pits of every color. There were birds — every kind you can imagine — and I remember walking behind a group of people. I was trying to mimic the birds’ whistles.

  “The dragons came from the north. They looked like giant flying snakes with short legs, and talons like eagles. Their wings were as wide as their bodies were long. They were beautiful, but we’d already fought our way through shadow creatures that burned, horse people who used human skin as clothing, and giant humanoids who destroyed everything they saw. We were cautious.”

  Sylph. Centaurs. Trolls. I’d be cautious after that, too.

  “Stef and I watched them coming. The way they moved through the sky was hypnotic, and we’d never seen something so large that could fly. But then one darted toward us, and I was the slowest to run away.” His voice snagged on memory. “There was green slime everywhere around me, and on me. Acid. It burned and itched, and then I saw bone.”

  I shuddered. That was the first time a dragon had killed him.

  “When I was reborn, it was in Heart. It seemed like the dragons had been guarding it from us, or trying to destroy it.” He still had that faraway expression, like he was seeing five thousand years past. “They attacked in the same way every time, on
e always straight for the temple as if to rip it from the ground. They were always unsuccessful, but it never stopped them.

  “Fifteen more times in my early lives. Acid, teeth, or just getting knocked off a wall.” He sighed. “No one else had luck so terrible. I thought they were after me in particular.”

  I twisted and touched his cheek, drawing patterns across his skin. It was dry now, sweat all evaporated.

  “I’m old, Ana.” He said it like that would change anything. I already knew this was only one incarnation of the musician I’d always admired. He closed his fingers around my wrist, gently. “I’ve died so many times. It always hurts.”

  I paused with my fingers resting on the tip of his chin. “Always?”

  “Some worse than others. The easy ones are when you die of poison or illness. Sometimes you get to go from old age.”

  The room turned into winter. “What does it feel like?”

  “Dear Janan. You shouldn’t ask that.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be willing to tell you.”

  Someday I would die too. I might as well be prepared.

  “It feels like being ripped out of yourself. Like being caught in giant talons or fire or jaws. It’s suffocating. And then there’s nothing for what seems like eons, but when you come back just as painfully, it’s only been years. Any time you’re killed — sylph, dragon, giant, anything violent — the pain lasts even after your soul is out. Something incorporeal shouldn’t be able to hurt so much.” He hesitated, and his voice turned gentle. “I’ve been burned by a sylph too. It never feels quite right again. Sometimes, even generations later, I can still feel the fire.”

  I held my fists to my chest.

  “That’s why everyone focuses on the present and future. The past is too painful when you remember how lives end. Often abruptly.” He shook his head. “In a dragon attack four generations ago, Stef had to save my hat for me to bury. It had been thrown aside, and was the only thing left.”

  I couldn’t imagine living, or dying, like that. For millennia. And then I’d come along, always asking about things that had happened before me. I hadn’t meant my curiosity to cause so much pain.

  Before I could find an apology good enough, he said, “I think last week wouldn’t have been so dramatic if I hadn’t already been killed by dragons not twenty years ago.”

  That was before I’d been born, but it probably felt recent to him. “What happened?”

  He stilled, arms loosening around me. “I went north because I was lonely. I felt empty, and I needed inspiration. Stef, who’d just reached her first quindec, told me not to go because I was too old, but I didn’t have a reason to wait. Ciana had died a few years prior.”

  I nodded; Li had said Sam and Ciana had been close.

  “After traveling for weeks,” he murmured, sounding far away now, “I came upon a white wall that must have gone up a mile…” He trailed off.

  “Was it like Heart’s?”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “The wall. Did it have a pulse like the one around Heart?”

  “I—” He looked as confused as the day I’d asked how he knew the doorless temple was empty. “Dragons came from all around. Before I could do anything, they’d killed me.”

  “What about the wall?”

  “What wall?” He inhaled deeply, shook back into himself, and kissed my temple. “You’re trying to distract me. Good job.”

  My skin tingled where his mouth had touched. “But— Never mind.” Maybe the wall was a question for later. I could look it up in the library.

  “I think we should see how much time is left for your lessons.”

  “Are you sure you’re up for it?” I scrambled off his lap and onto my feet. As much as I’d liked being that close, it wasn’t fair that he could keep kissing my head when I wasn’t sure if that was something we were doing now. Library time, lunch, head kissing. Today was probably a trauma exception, but still.

  He took my hands when I offered to help him up, but he didn’t let me hold any of his weight. “Music lessons would restore some much-needed normalcy, and I’d like to hear what you were playing.”

  I shifted and shrugged. “I don’t want you to… you know.” My insides flip-flopped. It had been easier to play when he wasn’t there.

  “I’ll be fine.” He brushed his knuckles across my cheek.

  I ignored his touch and headed for the door, forcing my tone light. “Okay, then. But no laughing. I don’t have a million years of practice composing in my head.”

  He scoffed. “I’m not that old.”

  “And the piano wasn’t even invented yet. Yeah, I know. Sing another tune, Sam.” I strained a smile. He wanted normalcy? Fine.

  He feigned shock as he followed me into the hall. There he reclaimed my hand and stopped, spinning me toward him as though we were dancing. “I just thought of a name for your waltz.”

  I waited.

  “If you like it, that is. We can always change it.” His voice shook, probably because it had been such an awful morning, but I imagined he wanted my approval. “‘Ana Incarnate.’”

  My heart felt too big for my ribs to cage.

  For all the unfair head kissing, the way we hadn’t kissed in the kitchen, and his grudging agreement to dance with me every morning — it suddenly seemed he knew me better than anyone in the world. Better than anyone ever would.

  He’d seen my deepest need, buried so far I’d hardly been aware of it.

  There was no telling if I’d be reborn when I died, but the waltz began and ended with my four notes. He’d built the music around things that reminded him of me. And now this name. My name.

  A hundred or a thousand years after I died, someone could play my waltz, even Li, who’d always resented my presence, and they would remember me.

  Thanks to Sam, I was immortal.

  Chapter 19

  Knife

  TRUE TO HIS threat of having the rest of today be normal, we made our way downstairs, no time for me to bask in the revelation of my immortality. Still, I felt I glowed a little as I approached the piano.

  Maybe the worst was over. Maybe we really could get back to normal, which meant I needed to tell him about the footsteps, but I squashed that impulse for now. He did need to know someone had followed me, but I could tell him later, when we hadn’t just discussed his many deaths, and when he hadn’t just immortalized me through his music.

  I took my place at the piano, not entirely comfortable with the way he looked over my shoulder.

  “Warm up again.”

  I knew better than to argue, just donned my fingerless mitts. Scales and arpeggios flew from under my fingers while Sam perched on a stool nearby, looking thoughtful. “What?” I asked.

  He shook his head, as if knocked from a trance, and reached for a notebook and pencil. “Play what you wrote.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If anything happens, you’re right here to rescue me.” He flashed a smile, and for the next two hours I played and struggled to translate it to paper while he took notes and hmm-ed at me.

  “This is much harder than I thought it would be,” I said when we took a break for lunch. “It’s not even a complicated song.”

  “I think you’ll find that the simple things are often the most challenging. Everything shows in them. Everything matters.” He slid his notebook across the table and raised his eyebrows. “Another hour of practice before we head to the library?”

  That was a good sign. All last week, he’d practically ripped me from the piano so he could get back to his research, though he never said what he wanted to know so badly. As anxious as I was to find out what else Menehem had written in his diaries, I was happier Sam was behaving more like himself. Learning about my father had waited eighteen years. It could wait another hour.

  “That sounds perfect.” I leaned over to see what his notebook held. Scribbles and musical notes stared up at me. “What’s this?”

  “Some things we might discuss about your mu
sic.”

  I slumped. “It was awful, wasn’t it?” He’d let me work on it for hours before telling me? I couldn’t decide whether to be angry or devastated.

  I wanted to run upstairs and hide my shame, but that wouldn’t help me improve. Instead, I grabbed the notebook and started toward the parlor. Might as well get it over with.

  “Actually, I thought it was pretty.” He touched my elbow. “Did you even read what I wrote? Or did you just assume?”

  “What do you think?” I pressed the notebook against his chest. “You didn’t say anything about it, and I just started. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but this page is filled. I think the next one is too.”

  He gave me an exhausted look as his hands closed over the notebook. “Nothing is perfect, not even when you’ve been playing for several lifetimes.” Without waiting for me, he marched back into the parlor and set the notebook on his stool. “I know you think either you’re amazing the first time, or you’re a failure, but that’s not how this is. Nothing is like that. Yes, there’s room to improve this piece, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Remember? You just started. And you didn’t bother to notice I wrote things like, ‘This is lovely.’”

  v

  “Fine.” I sat on the piano bench again, determined to do better. Even my scales sounded angry.

  Sam slipped onto the bench next to me, interrupting a major scale. His hands covered mine.

  “Music is the only thing that ever mattered to me,” I whispered to the ringing silence. “Every time I hurt, I had one place to turn. I need to be good at it.”

  “You are. I don’t, and probably won’t, tell you enough. Can’t have my students getting cocky.” He smiled; I didn’t. “But you are good at this. I’ve never enjoyed teaching someone as much.” He curled his fingers with mine and leaned toward me. Our thighs pressed together and his voice deepened. “I want to tell you something.”