There were crickets on the Garde, and the distant sounds of the last seagulls to cry out over the river before the night fell, and Elaine lay amidst candlelight and was Joy.
She did not want to sleep as anyone but herself. But Lyndin had told her that the little stone in her hand was not guaranteed to work, and had told her not to waste it.
She did not know if it would work. She did not even know what it would do, if it did. But she looked at it, its silver shimmer illuminated by the golden glow of her palms, and figured that this was the best chance she could give it. She was calm, now, or so she believed herself to be; cooled by anger towards the man for whom she had been doing all this work, she believed herself to be acting out of nothing but disinterested charity towards him. Surely this was the best possible way to do what she had framed to herself as research, finding relief in the comforting clinical coldness of the word.
Gouvernail, somewhere out in the bailey, was playing some meandering tune, perhaps unaware that she could hear him. As she bound up her eyes, she folded the little stone within the silk against her temple and tucked the hanging ends away, leaving her ears uncovered so that she could listen still to that ghostly music as she subsided into sleep. It seemed to her, in the last moment of consciousness as it stole away, that the music fell silent.
—
The light came in on golden hour - pristine, beautiful - and the sound of gulls was on the water.
The mossy, pebbled stretch that led to the riverside was dotted with little pavilions as if for visiting dignitaries, their poles flying colorful flags. Pennants fluttered on ropes between them, creating a bright little makeshift village, and every tent flap, as she passed it, was raised to show the cozy accommodations within, all glinting with golden threads and soft with fur and velvet. It was, she realized with a silent inward laugh, everything she'd ever dreamed a magical kingdom, outfitted for pleasure, ought to be.
She wound down between the tents, walking on carpets laid over the bare ground that were soft on her bare feet, and she passed into the largest. It stood very near the water and had its canvas walls drawn up on both sides, allowing her to step into its candlelit shade, seat herself on a low, broad sort of sofa within, and look down to the river to watch the gulls chasing one another above the rosy water.
She was accustomed to the Garde sometimes being occupied when she dreamed it, although she had thought, given all those lonely pavilions, it must be empty now. But a lone figure sliced through the water, and after a moment she recognized it. Her lingering anger seemed remote, in this moment, and as unreal as he must be.
She had dreamed him here before. Save for that ill-fated meeting on the ramparts that had ended in grief, she had always known him to be unreal, populating the imagined Garde with his fleeting self. He had never seen or heard her, always only moved distantly and briefly among the place - and only, she realized, when she had dreamed in the chapel - and so she watched with growing dread as he continued to exist. The idea that this had ever been merely research seemed as distant as the anger. That had been, of course, her subconscious armor against the horrible pain of flimsy hope, which had not been extinguished by her anger.
She watched him stand in the shallows after his swim, and although he was only bare to the waist it felt taboo to look at him as he turned gently back and forth in the low rays of sunlight with his head thrown back, so that she nearly averted her eyes. She had seen him once outside of his armor, on the ramparts, and he had seemed smaller, somehow, and more real, even cloaked in the majestic layers of something that was almost a prince. Now reduced to his scarred brown shoulders, he seemed almost slight by comparison to the way he seemed in gambeson and mail, his arms slimmer and less weathered than she had imagined but moving with the ease of limber strength as he lifted palmfuls of cool water to his face and ran them through his hair as if relishing the sensation.
The stiff, contained formality of his movement was gone, unencumbered by the Garde’s uniform and replaced by an unselfconscious air that was - she realized - doing more to make her feel like an intruder than the exposed skin of his shoulders. He had once, thinking her asleep, touched a carved seagull on the wall of the chapel in much the same gentle way: the way he moved when, as he thought, he was unseen.
The dream was often wrong. But it was rarely wrong in a way that was a direct defiance to her expectations. He was not what she would have guessed, and it was this knowledge that was filling her with an awful terror as she watched him walk out of the water, shaking his hair back and reaching up to strip a handful of petals from a flowering branch that overhung the riverbank, bringing them to his nose.
He was, she realized, trying to live, in the small way that this small dream afforded. He had compared himself to a man imprisoned, and he wandered now in aimless, overawed freedom, attempting to indulge his senses. It seemed cruel that he could have nothing but that ancient familiar river and the gulls above it, but perhaps when one had been a prisoner of centuries, a place that was almost like a home was better than any overpowering novelty.
She rose, thinking in panicked confusion that - even though she had said that she would be here for this moment - she should go before he noticed her and interrupted his prayer to his own body and its place in the world, but it was too late. The movement had drawn his eye, and he looked at her - saw her - and flung himself towards her with an almost convulsive movement before he recalled that things were not now what they had been on the ramparts. At this recollection of what was fractured he drew himself from a sprint to a slow and uncertain step. He still approached her, but warily, as one might approach an animal that might flee or bite, but which one desperately wanted to befriend. It took him a moment to find his words, his lips parting and no sound, for long seconds, following.
“I had forgotten,” he said at last, very gently. “For so long I had forgotten what a pleasure this place is. Allow me - forgive me, I have no right to ask you, especially given - but I must. Please allow me this one other -” And as she had known he would, he extended his hand towards her. It had been, after all, the first gesture of kindness he had ever made to her. Her pretending to accept it had been her first kindness to him. A few wet petals still clung to his forearm; as he stooped into the pavilion and into the light of the candle within it, the damp curls plastered to one temple gleamed reddish; the other temple, still in sunlight, was streaked over with silver waves darkened to iron grey by the water. “For my gratitude,” he added, with a kind of quiet desperation when she did not respond. But she could not move, trembling, and as he stood before her she felt as incapable of touching him as she ever had been. “You did this for me. I do not know how. But you gave me this.”
It was half a question, and all she could do was give one very small, very timid nod of confirmation.
She had often imagined herself very powerful, and very secure in that power. But she had sought help and knowledge in others in some effort to cultivate it, and the fruit of that labor and that help stood before her in the shape of something like a miracle that she had done, and for the first time Elaine, conscious of owning a power much larger than she had imagined, quailed before it and before all the terrible obligation of having it.
He, unaware of what passed through the mind of the woman he had sometimes called a saint, not because of any virtue but because of that capacity for the working of miracles, could only see that she did not move or speak, and his face twisted in a split second expression of pain.
“I will not ask you to overcome your anger against me any more than you already have in granting me this,” he said, in a voice so grief-stricken and guilty that she, now, was the one to make an uncontrollable movement towards him, even as he turned away. “I would not have you take my hand only out of pity. I would rather not have it at all than to have it in a way that disgusts you. I will find some other way - later - as there are too many words to tell you that I am grateful, and also not enough, and I thank God that your anger has not overcome your kindness. At least come down to the water - if you will - to see the sun, or -”
“I am still mad at you,” she said, her voice shaky when she found it. “But I don't want to remember that right now. I don't know how I did this. I'm afraid that if I touch you it'll be over. Like last time.”
He searched her face in the dim light. “If it is only for me that you hesitate,” he said at last, “pray - pray remember that I told you that even if it were only a moment -”
“It's not just for you.”
“Lady, you will think me - Lady, to say so is kindness enough.” He still stood at that little distance without reaching again for her, despite the obvious pain in him, and spoke quietly, with humility. “And it is - it is better. I remember you saying that we would do well to - to step away from - It would be a wrong - I, whose every feeling has been born from the way that you have chosen and defend your life - I might seem to ask you to find some reason to -”
“I’m not anyone but Elaine right now and I'm not going to do what I don't want to,” she said, defiant despite herself. “I'm scared that it'll make it just a moment for you, and I'm scared of what we do after you wake up - but ******** you, how dare you, to say that it's better if I'm too ******** scared to, to, to - this was supposed to go differently,” she finished in a miserable burst that came with a few tears, realizing it as she said it.
“Few things ever go as they ought to. But you have, then, imagined how it might,” he said, clutching at the idea and holding it like it had been some unlooked-for prize. “Forgive me. I cannot be wise, or kind. Good God, Lady, please - let me remember what I have done, for once, rather than regret what I have not. Do you want me to take your hand?”
“Yes,” she said tremblingly. “More - yes.”
“Then I care nothing for what comes of it. If it is good to you to be near me, I care for nothing.”
“And what if you forget?”
“Will you tell me?”
“Yes. If you want.”
“I do.”
She did not say the wretched thing that wisped through her: that then they might be even, since she already could not remember what he could. It wasn't true. That had been someone else. She said this, instead: “I would tell you everything.”
“And that you wanted me to take your hand?”
“Yes.”
“I ask only for your hand, then. Please. This small favor. I will not ask for more. I will say nothing that might pain you.”
For all his almost-breathless pleading he stood motionless as he said it, however, the precious seconds slipping by and leaving an unknown number ahead of them that could only dwindle with every reluctant pause. But still she had to steel herself, and he had to search her face again for a sign of her willingness, before he again lifted his hand and she put her own into it, both of them cold and trembling. And when he did not wisp away from reality, he stooped and lifted her hand reverentially to his lips, for the first time both real and unhurried.
She fought against a tide of awful, terrifying joy and rage, and spoke to avoid bursting into tears. “Is this what it looked like back then?” she asked, as he released her hand and half-straightened, his eyes still searching her face. The action seemed to have reduced him instantly to his usual gentle, restrained calmness, but agitation flowed into her and made her skin feel hot where it had been cold moments before.
“Almost. But you dream the light wrong.”
“Maybe it's your dream, though,” she said with a shaky laugh, and impulsively she again put forward her hand, which he again took.
“I did not think that I could dream any longer,” he said, and for a moment he only held her hand before him. But he lifted it again to murmur against her fingers, and then raised his other hand to cradle her hand in both of his, cupped to his mouth, his eyes closed. “But I have sometimes of late thought that if I could - this might be the shape of that dream.”
He said it with an untouched calm. He would, she thought, have walked away from her there and never asked for another touch or even a look, if she had told him it was as much as she would ever give.
(They had known each other, really, very little. To believe otherwise would be to accept the terrible idea that they had known each other for lifetimes, and this she would not do. Maybe the trembling intensity of this moment had less to do with the measure of hours spent speaking, and more to do with the simple fact of their constant, purposeful kindness to one another, even when they were cruel; perhaps it was only that they had thrown themselves into a silent alliance against the Cauldron and every hateful expectation it had forced on them together. Such things might make an hour as weighty as a day.)
“This is your dream? Are you that easily satisfied?” she asked, timid and awful, fascinated by the apparently-total placidity that had taken him even as her own wild inward agitation grew more and more restless.
“No,” he said immediately, his voice a murmur against her hand before he let it go, reluctantly but without attempting to recall it. “But when one has expected nothing, anything is everything. I am reduced to speaking nonsense.”
“It's good nonsense, if that's what it is.” It was a relief to laugh. “But you're not satisfied.”
“No. But, Lady, understand that I can never be. Therefore any small kindness is the same as - understand that even if it were possible to - understand that for a feeling such as I have, no satisfaction can ever be possible. A hungry man might eat and a tired man might rest, but a man who - forgive me,” he said, broken, ashamed, apologetic. “I speak too freely, when I have promised to do otherwise.”
She understood, then, his calmness. She reached to touch his jaw and the damp curls at his temples, and could not speak. He, after a startled moment during which he almost pulled away, instead stooped to allow her. But he folded his arms behind his back in obedient stillness that had neither impatience nor playfulness in it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to him to simply wait, even as their unknown number of moments together streamed past them, reduced to what might even be nothing.
Perhaps, she thought with a pang, he had learned that from someone like herself a thousand years ago, and whose soul was now in some way still trapped within her own chest. But she believed, at least, that when his eyes met hers steadily over the thumb that she passed across the scar on his cheekbone, he saw no one but herself. At least not here, and not now - and what other place and time could matter?
“I still don't know if it's real,” she whispered, afraid that to speak loudly would somehow wake them violently. “It feels real. But -”
“Then, Lady,” he murmured back as if with the same fear, “if it is good to you - do as you would if it were real.” And she was not entirely sure how it was that he then spoke against her mouth, except that it had been her doing. “Please.”
She had always been weak to that word in the mouth of a man, and the more so when it caught, as it did now, on the force of its own vulnerable honesty, leaving it barely audible. “Please,” he said again, and then a third time which went unheard, caught in an answering sound in her own voice, which had no word in it at all.
—
Some solitary bird cried its complaints out to the Garde, and the candles had gone out, replaced by the slanting rays of early sun falling into the grey chapel.
The stone was pressed hard between her temple and the bed, and her head throbbed with the pain of it. She reached to pull it free with the mask, and it fell into her hand, grey, inert, useless.
She scarcely glanced at it, turning to where he should have been with the sleepy confusion of irrational hope. It was gone before she could even adjust her eyes to the light - gone with the cold emptiness of the bed, with the lack of any answering movement to her stirring.
But he knelt, a very dim shadow beside the altar that was her bed, and after only a moment of meeting her eye with a quiet gravity that answered every unspoken question, he bent his head and folded his hands over the place where hers rested, unfelt.
The future yawned in an uncertain and terrifying vastness, but the stomach churning sensation that rose up to contend with her pounding headache was not regret, however similarly it might be shaped. She lay still and considered that although she would not have wanted to undo her own miracles, she was not sure how to live in the wake of them.
