word count: 3100
08/10

This is a dream that does not come from any magic but the usual magic of sleep: he with his back to her, a hazy network of scars and freckles, the shape of him moving beneath the skin as he bends to put something down on the floor by the bed which is, in the hazy way of dreams, a lute or a sword or a paperback book, which exists only to let her see the vulnerable reality of his shoulders moving.

This is a real dream, with no magic or lucidity in it, but it is like reality: She makes a play-acted sound of pleasure and approval when he bends to her throat, before remembering that he has paid her nothing and that she owes him no lies.

This is a real dream, the same as any other: when he touches her, she feels nothing at all.

—

The rain saved her from having to make her usual obligatory turn with the whip. Convenient, she thought, to have a weapon you could only wield in such a large space as the Garde did not truly offer indoors.

She sat on that same broad windowsill where they had at first spent so much time, winding up a recounting of her recent exploits which had been initiated by informing him, not without a sort of smugness, that her aim had gotten pretty good.

But that initial tone of playfulness had mellowed, and she found herself telling the last of things in as straightforward a way as if she was reading it off some sanitized incident report. From the rain or from some other cause she was listless, and after she had sat in silence for some minutes he sat across from her - as he had done before - and picked up the lute, embarking on a tune that ran through the rain-broken quiet like another rivulet of water down the stone: gentle, unobtrusive.

She did not look at him. Since that last visit when he had turned that strange expression of possessive anger on her - no, not even on her, but on that scrap of fabric - she had felt the distance between them widening back into a gulf from where she had imagined it was narrow. She did not want to see him looking back at her, as he sometimes did, with that gravity that she could never entirely place.

It would be easier to simply ask him. She hated herself for not doing it. But there was the fear that he would admit that he had lied to her, or that worse, he would deny it, and leave her to wonder if now he had lied twice. She was not brave enough.

“Did you know anyone named Odainsaker?” she asked at last, and he only briefly paused in his playing.

“The name is familiar, but I could not hazard any details. Why, Lady?”

“I met her. The old one. And she wanted me to send her well wishes, and I said I'd ask you if you had any message to send.” She paused. “She said she was lonely. I suppose that after a while you want to hear from anyone whose name you ever knew, if no one else is around.”

He was silent for a long moment, aside from his music. “If that were true I would welcome news of Grieve,” he said at last, and she laughed in spite of herself.

“I think she's warmed up to you. She says she'd - oh, how did she put it - throw you down and bounce you through a floor. Kind of violent,” she added approvingly.

He looked, at this information, genuinely disturbed. “In future, if you will,” he said hastily, “feel free to keep such ideas between yourselves. God knows -”

He abruptly stopped, music and all, as if catching himself in an error mid sentence - and she again felt that sick surge of worry that he concealed something from her.

“God knows what?” she asked, with an effort at carelessness that was itself little better than a lie.

“Everything, I believe. But spare me from the indignity of finishing the thought, Lady, if you will. I spoke without considering.”

She thought that if she demanded it, he would speak. But she no longer trusted that he would speak truly. So she hesitated, feeling her face going red with some awful cocktail of mortification and anger.

She needed to approach it. Perhaps it would be the necessarily painful cure of this unpardonable fixation of hers, and free her from a girlish weakness in herself that she despised. It would be worth it to kill that weakness. But she could not - as she might usually have done - simply launch herself into the problem. She would have to sidle up to it.

“You can't be that surprised.”

This, however, seemed immediately untrue, as he startled so severely in the act of applying the quill to the strings that he merely sounded a single discordant note. She could feel his eyes on her, but her own were turned outwards, to the grey river rippling in the rain. “You expect me, then, to have anticipated not only that the discussion would be had, but that -”

“Well. I mean, come off it,” she said, letting herself at least try irritation on for size. “You know what you look like and what you are. Don't pretend you were totally oblivious to however many people used to make moon eyes at you like sad little cows while you made yourself a pretty martyr or whatever. Even if none of them was Grieve, necessarily, although I think she generally looks at people - and not martyrs - more like something with big teeth than like a cow.”

The silence this time was very long. She felt herself growing redder still, and then white, her face very cold as she ignored the feeling of him looking at her.

“And yet,” he said at last, with that dangerous quiet in his voice that she had not yet learned the nuances of, which might be anger or a wounded spirit in equal likelihood, “I never looked for such a thing.”

“Didn't you?” She demanded impulsively, looking at him at last, and finding no further clues to his emotion in the strange expression that looked back at her. “Or was it just - what did you say that one time - that you didn't make a habit of it?”

Again, silence, broken at last. “If you will be generous enough to tell me what this reproach is for, Lady, I might better know whether to beg forgiveness or mercy. I thought you had done chastising me for not living my life, but perhaps you only meant to move to particulars.” And even this, which might have had a biting snap of rage in it, seemed held so tightly in his control that she could glean nothing from it at all.

“I'm not reproaching you,” she answered, heated. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Forgive me, Lady. You do so often enough that it was the natural assumption to make,” he answered, and this time there was that telltale thread of mildness that she knew to be his sarcasm.

“Did you lie to me?”

It burst out of her in a way she had not intended, and she felt sick, turned away from him, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing an expression of complete astonishment.

“Lady,” he said at last, voice strangled now with palpable anger, “I told you I would not lie to you. I never have. But you doubt me, now.”

“Yes. Because you - who did it belong to, then? Because you told me you never kept a space for anyone, but you must have -”

His astonishment, then, muted him for so long that she thought at first that he would end in confessing everything: misleading her, having some secret life that he had not seen fit to share with her. Lying to her.

“I would not insult you by imagining you to be threatened by such a thing,” he said at last, coldly. “Therefore I must assume that you intend to humiliate me in some way, as I know you take pleasure in doing.”

“I'm not trying to humiliate you,” she shot back. The first part of his reply she left untouched. It was true that she wasn't threatened - not even jealous, really, because envy was not quite the same as jealousy - but to have said so would have been beneath her own dignity - or what little she had of it, in this moment. “I want to know how you can say you never lied to me.”

“Because I have not,” he said, his voice rising as he did, resting the lute against the wall in a moment of gentleness despite his anger. “I kept no space for anyone. I never have. If others kept space for me, I know not. I did not encourage them. I was not a monk, for God's sake. Did you think I was a child, who had never so much as -”

“Don't,” she said, shutting down a sentence she could not bear to hear the end of.

“Chastise me now, Lady,” he said acerbically, walking to the other end of the Hall to look through the doorway into the bailey below. “For not giving my heart away every time that - for what I neglected to do, if not for dishonesty. At least reproach me on a justified ground for my offenses - which were not against you, and have never been against you, but against myself. But as you love to punish me for my offenses against myself - as I say, Lady, chastise me as much as you please, if you think I would have served myself better by keeping a space that would not have been filled.”

She was silent, trembling with sudden awareness that perhaps it was worse that he had told the truth. “Who was she?” she asked at last, feeling small and wretched.

“I do not know,” he said flatly. “I kept so little space for her that I cannot say. By all means, torment me with the idea that it ought to have been otherwise. I see now why you mistrusted me. Could I scourge myself for your satisfaction, perhaps you would see fit to-”

“I don't want to torment you,” she protested, resisting a dangerous temptation to frustrated tears. “Despite what you think and how often it happens anyway. I'll put the ribbon back.”

“No.” This came out too much like a command; he softened it immediately, and she heard him do it. “No. Pray, Lady, do not do such a thing. Wear it, if you like. Put it away elsewhere if you like. But do not return it to where it was.”

“It bothers you when I wear it.”

It was only half a question, and he paused.

“No. I do not lie,” he added, with a trace of heat. “But I think the truth would give you no pleasure.”

“Oh, because I'm having a great ******** time with the conversation so far,” she retorted. “Go ahead, then.”

But he said nothing, and she felt again that dangerous misgiving.

“Go ahead,” she repeated, more firmly. He had always, of course, been inclined to do whatever she told him to do, even when those things were impossible. She felt, now, the terrifying idea that her power over him had unforeseen limits.

“Pray, spare me from speaking, if the truth is not worth hearing,” he said at last, in a tone of such sudden humility that she was startled. “I will beg, if I must, but I pray you be merciful enough to -”

“Don't beg,” she said. “You don't wanna say something that's gonna piss me off. Don't say it, then.” And she despised herself for the relief that swelled up in her as she said it, as if she had narrowly dodged a self-inflicted wound. She didn't want to know. It might have been wiser to know and crush her own emotion with the knowledge, but it felt better to remain ignorant. “I guess not getting into details I didn't ask for isn't the same as a lie. Never mind. I'm sorry I didn't believe you.”

“But you believe me now?”

“Yes.”

The rain came down on their shared silence, she on the broad window ledge and he at the doorway, turned away from one another.

“What else did Odainsaker have to say to you?” he asked at last, his voice muted with what sounded to her like shame.

And hadn't she always been vulnerable to a man who was ashamed? A little too given to pity, and even kindness. A weakness, in her line of work, and one that she could overcome for a stranger, but not for this man in this moment.

“Not much. Said she wished she could have a pie, and a hard drink, and see the birds come back. Thought you'd appreciate that last one.”

“Perhaps I appreciate all three.”

“Is that what it's gonna be? If I - if I find some way-”

She had not even told him that she was looking for a way. It was a good and needful reminder that she, too, held her secrets away from him so that she would not be compelled to lie or say something that would hurt him. It earned him in a moment all her forgiveness, especially as he took it only as some gentle joke - perhaps the effort on her part of doing as she'd once promised, and not treating his mortality like a taboo that could never be discussed.

“Perhaps not a pie,” he said mildly. “An apple, I think.”

“An apple? That's all you'd ask for, if I could bring you anything - No butter or cake or -”

“Lady, when you have not eaten an apple in a thousand years,” he said, with a gentleness that was an apology for anger and an acceptance of her own, “tell me how an apple sounds to you.”

“Maybe I'll bring you all of them and get you fat and lazy and gouty,” she said, falling back as well as she could on airy playfulness. It was not a soft landing.

“Why? To turn me away from cow eyes and sharp teeth, for my own good?” he suggested.

“I don't think it'd work,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I think you'd still - well.” And she flushed, again, her feelings too tumultuous to entirely stifle an urge to flirt her way out of an apology until she'd already gotten halfway into it. Awful, awful. She had to find a way to kill this.

He turned to look at her then, tired as he often was after these little explosions, and he crossed the hall to stoop for his lute. But he paused, and then sank to a knee near her instead of sitting on the ledge, as if compelled to speak to her from somewhere that was not above her. He was - in a way he never openly had - supplicating her, undoubtedly aware that he was addressing her on her weak side by doing it.

“One day, if I find the courage to speak to you more freely, will you hear me with kindness?”

“I don't know,” she said, alarmed by this sudden appeal and disgusted by a sudden pleasant turning of her stomach at this gentle debasing of himself. “Maybe I'll hate you for it. But I'll listen, anyway.”

“I thank you for telling me the truth,” he said, and after a pause he reached for the lute once again. She, compelled by an awful sudden thought, reached out to rest her hand on it - this one thing that they could both touch - and after an instant he, seized by apparently the same realization, touched one of those spectral strings to see whether the pressure of her earthly fingers changed its music, and then rested his hand where hers was, so that the hum of the instrument could be felt by them both.

She seemed for a moment to be observing the scene from somewhere else: he on one knee beside her, their hands resting together on the neck of the lute, with the rain interrupting their mutual silence.

If it were a dream, she thought, it would go differently here. The thought was instantly shameful, and repulsed her into abruptly standing and moving away from him.

“I want to go - to the chapel - don't follow me. Stay here,” she said, with imperious command. “I'll come for you when I'm ready to leave. I'm not mad at you,” she added, childishly.

“I understand,” he said, with that same muted humility that was almost shame, and she had to leave, before it could break down her defenses.

She would not be a hypocrite, if she could help it. She withheld so much from him - not least her own feelings and how much they disgusted her - and so she could not very well complain if he withheld some from her. Still, it gnawed at her to consider that his loneliness, then, might have been an even more conscious decision than she had imagined - or that perhaps he had once meant to end that loneliness, and failed only due to the indifference of another.

She did not know which was the more awful to consider, and indignation rose in her against some imaginary woman who had turned away from him, as her envy had risen against the imaginary woman that had turned towards him.

(And what did he know? Why would it make her angry? Surely, she argued, only because he thought her still full of contempt for him for throwing away all the joy of his short life, and dreaded another harangue for mistakes he could no longer fix. No other cause -)

It would pass, and she would redouble her efforts to make sure that it did. But not before - forgive her this weakness - she considered - horrible indulgence - the way that he had without speaking placed his hand in the same place that hers rested.

It would be awful - an unthinkable cruelty - if he felt even slightly towards her as she currently did towards him. It would have been too terrible a thing to endure, even if it was as transient as she was determined her own feelings would be. To want what he could not have and be subjected to her in the absence of any other person - to be patiently waiting for fleeting closeness to what he must feel wretched for wanting to begin with - even to want for a single ill-judged minute - surely it was only that he had wanted in that moment any human kindness at all, and she was, after all, the only one who could give it.

She would never wish it on him, she thought, only to realize, sick, that she already did.