She could feel him watching her. She knew that he’d be watching her anyway - she had too often looked up and seen him with his eyes on her, expressionless or angry or tired - but she was uncomfortably aware of it, now.
He had not yet chosen to bring up the way that Encke and Viatrix had spoken to her of loving the place and having it love her back, but it was possibly only because he knew he had no need to. It had underpinned much of that visit and now it underpinned the tense and humming silence with which he had greeted her, and with which he now watched her.
“If you’re saving up a lecture,” she said, heaving a piece of debris out of one pile and into another with more vehemence than necessary, “do me a favor and go ahead.”
“To what end, Lady?” he asked coldly. “As my lectures appear to benefit you in no way.”
“Don’t be childish.”
“This, from you?” he demanded.
“I’m being the adult in the room this time, believe it or not.”
He did not dignify this with a response. She pushed over a pile of timber and canvas tangled up in half-rotted ropes - the remnants of some sort of pavilion, she imagined vaguely - and found beneath it what she’d been trying to uncover this entire time: the lid of the large, flat chests that had been buried by rubble and refuse. This had been some sort of store room, he’d told her once; she had disregarded it then for easier targets, but her curiosity about what rotten mementos awaited in the rows of chests and trunks had gotten the better of her - especially now, when it suited her combative mood to be sweaty and red-faced and in a position to shove things.
She turned from the task, finally fixing him with as imperious a glare as she could muster - which was considerable - and wishing that she could look down her nose at him without having to stare at the ceiling to manage it. She attempted, instead, to imbue the look with the essence of looking down her nose, which was much easier.
“Sulk if you want,” she snapped. “You spent weeks bitching at me for not trying hard enough to be the Garde, and now you’re pissed at me for trying too hard.”
“No. I know you are not stupid enough to misunderstand me, and so I can only conclude that you do so willfully.”
“You’re the one doing the willful misunderstanding. You’re pretending like I’m trying to to ******** - install myself here - I can’t even come here more than once every couple of weeks, I don’t know why you’re acting like it’s some sort of addictive -”
“I am only asking you to stop giving yourself reasons to abandon the life you have made for yourself. I am only asking you -”
“You don’t know what I want. You don’t even know what you want,” she snapped. “That’s your problem. I always know what I want.”
Somewhat to her surprise, he fell silent. He was no longer looking at her, but rather past her, his eyes fixed dull and sightless on the unglazed window where a breeze stirred the clouds of dust she had dislodged, pale eddies in the square of sunlight.
“And what I want,” she plowed on, determined to seize the moment no matter what its cause might be, “is for you to stop - pretending like you being able to teach me some things means that you know how it’s best for me to live my life. You don’t. You couldn’t even figure out how to live yours -” she finished, regretting the words as soon as they fell out of her mouth, and actually reaching into the air as if she could somehow recall them before they could be heard.
She might have apologized, in a different moment, as soon as she could. But she was too choked by shame, and she stood in silence.
A long, long moment crawled by. She had just decided to break the interminable tension by returning to her work, but before she could move, he spoke, and he returned his eyes to her when he did.
“That is true,” he said simply, very quietly. “But sometimes failure does make a better teacher than success.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said at last, returning to clearing off the chests for the sake of no longer having to look at him. It was an ungracious, ill-natured thing to say - she rebelled against it - but she could not bring herself to apologize. It was the right thing to do, but she was still too angry to do it correctly, without making it bitter. She was tired of apologizing to this man - tired of finding herself wounding him, tired of the obligation to try and stop doing it. Tired of managing his feelings, when her own were growing increasingly unwieldy. She had been given this thing to carry against her will, and found it entirely too fragile, forcing her to handle it cautiously. “I try to avoid that particular kind of failure.”
“Then I will hope that you are doing so,” he said flatly, without emotion. “And I will constrain my service to that which pertains to the Garde.”
She could not answer. She found the hinges and the clasp on the chest - as large as her hand - unwilling to move; she wished for WD-40 or perhaps that angle grinder she’d mentioned to Ekstrom. But it was at least an outlet to her anger to grab the nearest heavy metal object and attempt a percussive approach.
She would have to apologize. She could feel already that if she didn’t she would come to hate herself a little - an unacceptable outcome. His early willingness to acknowledge his own haughty cruelty towards her had set a tone that she had no choice but to observe as well, and she resented him for it, wondering if it might have been easier if she could simply have despised him as he so clearly despised her.
The fact that she sometimes gave him reason to despise her was not lost on her.
She had been ashamed, before, in some vague way, for him to see her red-faced and sweating, her hair and her clothes disarrayed. She took a spiteful pleasure in it now. She felt ugly in a way that she rarely did, and it was an accurate reflection of her feelings. Let him enjoy her looking her worst, if he wanted to.
He spoke, suddenly, in that quiet voice that compelled her to cease her angry hammering just to hear him. “You said once that you had begun to hate me,” he said. “Do you hate me still?”
The question took her so much aback that she could not immediately reply. He added: “I do not know how to undo the impressions I made on you when first we met. And if it were to come at the cost of every kindness you have shown to me afterwards, I would think the price too high. But if you hate me - pray, Lady - if you hate me, allow us to begin again.”
Her stomach turned. Every minimal kindness - every moment that was not simply active cruelty - he had perceived as some self-sacrificing act of nobility, motivated entirely by a sense of obligation. And to some extent he was right. She had, after all, been constrained often by the awareness that she was the only person able to be kind to him. And yet he was unwilling to imagine that she had not made even that minimal effort towards treating him well - unwilling to pretend that she had not extended even this reluctant goodwill, unless she required it to cease hating him entirely.
But he was not wholly right - she could never have laid aside her own pride so entirely as to bend in charity towards a man she despised - and so she could not keep the disgusting gentleness from her voice: “I don’t hate you.”
But an instant later she nearly wished it unsaid - did hate him, for a moment - when his answer was one of naked humility, unashamed and unhurt. “Thank you,” he said, with a sincere gratitude that made her wish that she could grab and shake him.
“I don’t hate you,” she repeated, frustrated this time. She hated, as she had before, that words she had meant to speak in a tone of righteous anger emerged instead as a sort of wounded cry. “I just don’t know how to talk to you without getting pissed off.”
“I do not ask for gentleness,” he said at last. “Only your honesty. If your honesty is cruel, that is the price of it, and it is a fair price.”
“I don’t want to be cruel to you,” she said, ashamed at a lump in her throat. “I just don’t know how to avoid it. Everything is - all the ground’s dangerous - you know?”
“I thought that you reveled in cruelty,” he said, and it might have choked her at last into tears had she not perceived that he was, in some gentle way, trying to make a joke. It startled her into a watery laugh.
“Not like that,” she said.
“I know,” he said. And then, with the same unmuted humility: “Please. If you wound me - unknowingly - do not let it turn to anger. Pass over it, then. It is not at your feet, if I am too easily wounded.”
She shook her head. “No. Maybe it’s not at my feet that you’ve got - well. I’m not going to apologize if it was something I couldn’t help. But it’s at my feet if I’m an a*****e. And I was an a*****e. I’m not doing it on purpose but I’m still doing it.”
It was the closest she was going to come to an apology this time. He seemed to sense it, and she wanted, again, to shake him for not demanding more.
“But don’t tell me how to live. Please,” she added, forcing the word out, unaccustomed as she was to using it in that way. “I understand that you - that you’re trying to - I know you mean well. And if you’ve got advice about fighting - or, or what this place was once - or what it could be again - or any of those things that’ll keep me alive -” she waved a hand. “I want those. But please don’t tell me how to live. You don’t know how I live. Keep advice for the Joyeuse Garde, and not for Elaine.”
“I will try,” he said, after a long pause, “to remember it. But I have often forgotten it already. You will think me lax with my promises.”
“Well. And I keep saying I'm not going to get pissed when I say something thoughtless, but here we are. We’re both trying and ******** up,” she said grimly, with another swing of her arm that finally loosened whatever grime or rust or rot had sealed the clasp. It fell away with a clatter. “So we’re even again. One day we’re gonna get through a whole day without a fight,” she added with satisfaction, “and I’m gonna put it in my ******** calendar.”
She lifted the heavy lid - it required her entire shoulder and a heaving effort - and it fell open, exposing the contents to be folded fabrics, brightly dyed and neatly arranged within, and looking as new as if the elements had never touched them.
They were heavy - very heavy - as she realized when she pulled one forth, unfurling it across the floor she’d cleared to discover that it was as large as a bedsheet, or larger. It was, she realized, a banner: one of the ones that would have once flown from the keep’s roof. She ran a hand over the green threads, shot with gold; over the woven and embroidered shape of the Tristram knot that she had seen on her own signet ring and throughout the Garde, including on the back of of Gouvernail’s own spurs and woven into the fabric on the inside of his mantle.
“Not an Earth rune?” she asked, turning to reach for another, unfurling a length of blue and gold stripes.
“No,” he said. “The Garde is its own master, and bore its own banners - unless we chose to fly them to honor those who sought us as our guests. They announced our intentions.”
“What did this one mean?”
“A hunt. Guests. Revelry.”
She put it aside. There was no revelry here now; no noisy crowd to course the forests or celebrate feats of arms.
The next was the largest in the chest, and she ran her hands over the embroidery with a sudden smile.
“And this one?”
“A reminder that we exercised our powers to protect our people on our own terms. A declaration that our weapons were not at the disposal of any master but ourselves,” he said. “A warning, in its way.”
She paused, touching a stray thread by the lion’s sharp teeth. “It’s my nickname, you know. Leo. And Lyonesse, when I’m reveling in cruelty, as you put it.”
She looked up, only to find that he was not looking at the banner, but at her.
“It suits you,” he said quietly.
It was, she knew, not an unmixed compliment. But that had been in part why she had taken it.
“Which one is your favorite?” she asked, searching his face. “If they were flying again - which one would you want?”
This gentle invitation to him to exercise his own wishes did not go unnoticed. He swallowed - some instinctive movement of life, following him past death. “I did not think until this moment that I had one,” he said. “But I believe it must be that one.”
She began rolling it up, then, along with some of the smaller scarlet pennants bearing the Wonder’s emblem.
“Ekstrom wanted me to saw those things down, in case there was another lightning storm. But I think it would be better to use them as intended again.”
“It will be a great deal of trouble, to fly them again on your own.”
“I know,” she said. “But I have to tell myself that sometimes trouble’s worth it, or it’s bad news for me, trouble that I often am.”
“It will be,” he said at last, “a good reminder to me, of the promise that I have made to remember that you are your own master.”
“And a good reminder that I’m apt to get all scratchy even when you mean well. And if I’m ever feeling docile,” she added, “I’ll take it down, and I’ll make one with a little pussycat on it, to let you know I’m feeling tractable and you can yell at me, if you like.”
“I know enough to know when a threat is empty,” he said. “Therefore save yourself that trouble.”
She stood up, heaving the heavy roll of fabric onto her shoulder and beginning her struggle towards the narrow stairs to the roof. “I hope,” she said, with a sudden uncomfortable awareness, “that you don’t hate me either.”
“No,” he said simply. “I do not.”
“Good,” she said. “No do-overs, then.”
“No,” he agreed, and it was that obligated kindness, then, that she pretended not to see his useless attempt to get a door for her that he could not open - but it was also a silent repayment for the fact that he, too, had pretended not to see that she had for a moment tried to give him her hand, to shake on the agreement.
word count: 2500
