Land of the Beautiful Dead (35 page)

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.”