Land of the Beautiful Dead (84 page)

“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.”