Land of the Beautiful Dead (95 page)

Azrael nodded and lay his cool hand over her brow in a stroking motion that used to smooth her hair back, back when she had hair. “Later, then. I’ll take something with you later.”

“You don’t have to wait on me.”

“I don’t go to dinner for the food.” He bent to offer her a kiss; she took it as best she could, trying not to think too hard about how she must taste. He stayed that way for some time, his lips on hers, not moving, and when he finally straightened, he turned away and masked himself before she could get a good look at his face.

She wanted to ask if he was all right, but she knew what a stupid question it was, so she just let him walk away. She didn’t mean to fall asleep—if it was the last time, she didn’t want to be alone—but in the dark, in the quiet, sleep took her anyway.

The next time she opened her eyes, she thought she was having a nightmare about her own corpse leaning close to kiss her, but she scarcely had time to process that before her cadaverous twin tumbled up into the air and vanished, leaving Serafina beside the bed with a mirror in her hand.

“Oh good,” said Serafina, plainly relieved. “You’re…ah…awake.”

“What are you doing?” Lan asked groggily, struggling up as far as her elbows before collapsing back into the cushions. “Is it dinnertime?”

Serafina hesitated, then said, “I’ve been sent to make you ready.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say she didn’t want to go anywhere if she had to put any more effort into it than what it took to get up and walk, but hell, it might be the last time. Lan heaved herself out of bed and onto her feet, head swimming, and staggered over to the bath on Serafina’s arm.

She soon fell asleep in the water, as impossible as that should have been after sleeping all day and all night, but Lan didn’t fight it when she found herself nodding off. There were no good ways to be bathed, certainly not the way Serafina did it, but sleeping through it was better than most. So she slept, catching only vague impressions of what was happening to her unimportant body—rubbed, rinsed, lifted, dried, waxed, lotioned. Only when it was being dressed did Lan suppose she really ought to wake all the way up and help her handmaiden out a little.

The dress in which she found herself was not one she knew, but it fit her too well to have been made for anyone else. It had no beads, no embroidery, no corset; just a plain dress cut from fine cloth, blindingly white. It softened her wasted body the way snow softens uneven ground, but that softness only made the parts of her it couldn’t hide seem more haggard. On another woman, maybe even on the woman she herself had been only a few short months ago, it might have seemed a bridal gown; on Lan, this day, it was a burial shroud.

“Don’t you dare,” Serafina said as she outlined Lan’s stinging eyes in defining black, faking the lashes that had mostly fallen out by now. “He’ll be here any minute. Do you want him to see you crying?”

No. Lan willed her tears back and tried not to look at her reflection.

Serafina kept working, stealing swift glances at the person beneath the canvas she painted, until she apparently decided her mistress needed consoling. “You don’t look that bad. You looked so much worse before your treatments.”

“Thanks.”

“Honestly, even on your best days, you were never a great beauty, so it isn’t as if you’ve lost your best quality.”

And, because even at the end of all things, Lan had a bitchy side, she said, “Like what?” and felt with weary satisfaction as her handmaiden’s work came to a sudden stop.

“Well…that is to say…I’m sure you have many, many…many…”

“Name one.”

Serafina patted a layer of powder over Lan’s scalp, thinking hard, and finally said, “You still have your charm.”

The door opened. Azrael’s reflection appeared in the mirror as glints of gold over man-shaped shadow. He watched without speaking as Serafina made a last pass with the powder brush over every inch of Lan’s exposed skin, then beckoned the dead woman to him.

Lan pretended not to listen to the few words they exchanged, but could make out nothing clearly anyway, apart from Serafina’s, “Yes, my lord,” at the end of it.

“Something wrong?” Lan asked as her handmaiden withdrew.

Azrael looked at her, his eyelight dim and strained through the sockets of his golden mask.

“Something else, I mean.”

He still didn’t answer aloud, but he came to the vanity and pulled her gently from her chair. He touched her cheek, rubbed his powdered fingertips together, then took her over to the bath and knelt to dip one of his wash-towels in the water.

“Serafina worked hard on that,” said Lan as he wiped away an hour’s work in seconds.

“Needlessly.”

She tried to laugh.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, running the towel over her bald head.

“I am not.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Stop trying to fiddle me up. I know what I look like.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, erasing black eyeliner and smears of shimmery color to expose the sunken, pallid truth. “Or you would know how beautiful you are.”

Lan still stubbornly smiled, but her voice shook as she said, “Yeah, and if you really believed that, you wouldn’t have had her start painting me up in the first place.”

“Only so that none could look on your true face but me.” He wiped the cloth across her lips, slowly, like a kiss. “But there must be no masks tonight.”

She reached up.

He stepped back at once, but then bent his neck and allowed her to unbuckle the straps that held his horned mask on. Her arms trembled as she took its weight; he caught her wrists and steadied them as she lifted the mask and set it on the shelf with the others. 

They looked at each other.

When she took the wash-towel from his hand and found a clean corner, he turned his cheek very slightly toward her, although his gaze never left hers. “This is nearly healed,” she remarked, dabbing at the edges of the wound.

“Nearly closed, you mean.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There will always be a scar.”

“It’ll heal, too. In time.”

“Outwardly, perhaps,” he said, looking straight ahead and speaking in that distant, distracted sort of way that usually meant a storm of terrible emotion just below the surface. “I will always feel it.”

“But it won’t always hurt.” She put the towel down and smiled at him. “Shall we go to dinner?”

He did not return her smile, but he did offer his arm.

She walked at his side past ranks of pikemen to the stair, refusing to allow him to carry her up, but grateful for his strength to support her as she climbed out of the dark underfloor beneath the palace to the marble halls that glowed with light.

There were no guards outside the dining hall tonight, no pikemen lining the walls within, no servants waiting to wait on them, only Azrael’s steward, bowing self-importantly up to murmur assurances that all was in order. He bustled away to the kitchen at Azrael’s wave, leaving them to make the long, long walk to the imperial table unobserved. The rain drumming onto the high windows covered their footsteps in the echoing hall and helped soften the harsh pants of Lan’s breath. Once upon a time, she’d walked all the way from the Channel to Norwood; now it was all she could do just to make it to the other side of this room.

Azrael did not hurry her, nor offer to carry her, nor ask if she was all right. He simply held her up and slowed his pace to match hers. When they finally reached the narrow dais steps, he ascended first and helped her to follow, then brought her the last mile to her chair and lent her the strength of his arm one last time so she could sit without collapsing. A lady never plops into her chair, she reminded herself. Manners were so important.

She reached by habit for her napkin, but she had none. The imperial table had not been set for dinner. It was, in fact, entirely empty apart from candles, several garlands of gold ivy and white crepe, and half a dozen bowls, each boasting a squat and singularly ugly plant—a bulbous, yellowish lump with a few thick green leaves and tumorous-looking blossoms drooping from its nubby stalks.

“Adenia,” Azrael said, watching her. “A member of the passion flower family.”

Lan fingered one of the flowers and took a hesitant sniff. It didn’t have a strong scent, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not what she’d call a passionate smell, but not bad. “I’ve never seen one before.”

“Hardly surprising. Its native soil is far from this land.” Azrael pushed one claw deep into the skin of his inner arm and drew it out stained black with his blood. He fed two thick drops to the plant nearest to him through a split place on the stalk and watched without expression as its leaves slowly curled. “These are from my daughter’s private collection.”

Lan reached again for the napkin that wasn’t there, then folded her hands in her lap and stared meaningfully at the empty place where no plate was being filled in front of her. Azrael finished killing his plant and leaned back in his throne to watch the rain ripple down the window glass. He did not speak, did not look at her, did not touch her.

After several minutes of absolute nothing between them, Lan plucked one of the ugly flowers and tossed it at him. It bounced off his chest.

“Be patient,” he said, picking up the flower and placing it in the sandy soil of its bowl. 

“I’m really hungry,” she said, emphasizing every word. The days when she had any kind of an appetite were few and far between of late. She didn’t want to waste it, certainly not just to sit in this big empty room and stare at the ugliest centerpiece on the planet.

“I know,” Azrael said and oddly, he seemed to say it with genuine sympathy, but that was all he did.

“What are we waiting for?”

“It’s being prepared. Patience.”

She sighed and threw herself back in her spindly little chair and watched the rain wash down. “You could at least talk to me,” she muttered.

“No, Lan. I don’t think I can.”

The door to the kitchen whooshed open and in came Azrael’s steward, carrying a tray with a single covered dish on it. It was the first time Lan had ever seen him actually carry anything, as opposed to flapping his hands at a servant, and he did it with such an overinflated impression of consequence that she just knew whatever was under that dome was only just this side of food. Nonetheless, she leaned forward as he set the tray before her, not only resigned but eager to eat her way through a plate of gold-dusted truffles or fish eggs on toast as long as she got to eat
something
.

Azrael’s steward whisked the tray’s cover away to reveal a coffee service. Cream, sugar, plenty of flavorings, but no food, not even biscuits. Oblivious to Lan’s undisguised disappointment, the dead man laid it all out, then tucked the tray up under his arm and bowed once more to the throne. “Will that be all, my lord?”

“It better not be,” Lan muttered, reaching for the carafe.

“For now. Leave us.” Azrael waited for his steward to withdraw, then turned his own cup over and held it out to be filled. “If you would.”

Lan looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t think you liked coffee.”

“Perhaps I never had it prepared properly, by one who had the taste for it.”

Silly thing to get tickled over, but it tickled anyway. Smiling, Lan mixed him up a cup just the way she liked it, cream and sugar with a cinnamon stick to stir it in, and passed it over. As she made one up for herself, she watched him inspect, sniff, and finally sip at it.

“You take it quite sweet,” he remarked.

“Sorry. Things taste wrong to me these days.” She gave her own cup a try, doing her best to mentally filter out that sour tang that was always with her now. It wasn’t the usual blend, she thought. They’d opened up the fancy beans, something flavored, although she couldn’t say with what. Whatever it was, the cinnamon was setting it off. Not in a bad way, maybe, but definitely a different way. “It’s not terrible, is it?”

“No.” He had another swallow, as if to prove it, then promptly made himself a liar by topping off his cup and thinning out the sugar. Before she could apologize again, he said, “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. Everything. I want to hear your voice.” He had more coffee, not drinking so much as pouring it into his body, and gazed at the dead plant in the bowl before him. “I need to hear your voice.”

Lan’s life hadn’t all been misery and toil, but neither had it provided her with oceans of fond memories. She sipped at her coffee, considering and dismissing fragments of her life.

“Lan?”

“My mother and I grew peaches,” she began and so it went on from there. She told him of long days working in the greenhouse, of soil and sweat and the mud it made in every crease of her body, of the way the taste of peaches changed once you’d bled for them. Talk of the greenhouse invariably turned into talk of the Goode twins, whose rows little Lan and her mother had to work before they could even start to work their own, and that led to talk of Mother Muggs, who saw them off each morning and took them in each night, and that somehow led to the Fairchilds. She told him of feeding the mayor’s livestock and scrubbing his wife’s kitchen and then, to her very vague alarm, she heard herself telling him about Eithon, he of the blue eyes and winning smile, before he turned into groping hands and stomping feet and bones wrapped in weathered clothes hanging from Norwood’s broken wall.