06/15
word count: 2100

And this time, the sun was shining. She looked forward to a day of entirely selfish leisure, spared even from the obligation of trying to fill up the quiet that lingered between her and the Garde's ghostly watcher, and after a single trek into the trees to locate the boathouse - which she left, for the time being, with the idea of liberating whatever might be inside another day - she threw herself into indulgent laziness, with only a brief aside to ask him if he could be willing to speak with a Knight of Cosmos, if she were to bring one who wished to ask him questions about the Past. This, of course, he agreed to, with that little dip of his head that he always deployed to acquiescing to a request of hers.

Spared from all but this most desultory of work, she had taken it upon herself to spend most of the visit stretched out on one of the broad stones near the river, reclining on a towel under the sun and the breeze and reading in silence. Only - no, not in silence. The cicadas hummed; the new birds sang in the trees. It was not quite like being in a place that was alive, but it was closer than it had ever felt.

Most of her reading, however, had been staring at the same page sightlessly for minutes on end before moving her eyes back to the first line to begin again. She was putting off the inevitable, unwilling to even lift her glance to where Nail was standing at his usual post, his eyes turned over the water and his hand pressed to his side. She had then spent some time meandering back and forth on the curtain wall, nominally enjoying the weather and inwardly attempting to summon her courage, before eventually meandering down into the chapel with the sunset. Next time, she thought, she would bring Petitcru. The expenses for the dog sitter were piling up with these weekly visits, but also, she wished she had some excuse to turn her eyes and her hands towards something. To hold a dog and pet its ears would have been a relief. She even briefly and hysterically considered whether she could fit Pal down the stairs, to stroke one of her many foreheads.

Into the breach, she thought grimly, finally daring to lift her eyes to Nail standing in his habitual silence at the foot of the stairs, waiting for her to put herself to bed so that he could leave her and engage in whatever lonely silence occupied the time while she slept.

"Can we talk?" she said at last.

He seemed at first perplexed by the question. All they did, after all, was talk. What else could he do? "Of course, Lady," he said, after a long pause.

Well. Might as well get it over with. She yanked the mental bandage as hard as she could. "Would you rather not be here?"

Again, a perplexed quiet. "Compared to what alternative?"

This, she should not answer, and she sat in silence, trying to find the words for the idea and shying away from them.

"I cannot imagine you mean to torment me with impossible ideas," he said at last, with a touch of asperity.

"No. I just mean - if you could leave."

"For where, Lady?"

She hesitated, choking on the words before forcing them out with as much calmness as she could muster. "The cauldron."

He said nothing, motionless, his eyes still turned on her with a blankness that could only come of a powerful effort to avoid betraying anything he was thinking or feeling. The silence stretched interminably, and she turned away from him at last, to look with dull pain at the golden light still trickling in through the high windows.

"I'm sorry," she said at last.

"Do you wish me gone?" It was toneless, simple.

"No!" The word exploded out of her, almost in horror. "No, no. But I just - it's not about what I wish."

"Is it not?"

"No. No, please don't say that. Not about this."

He still spoke with a curious flatness, but she thought she could detect in it the tension of suppressed emotion. Probably anger, knowing Nail. "I have things yet to teach you."

"When you're done."

The silence this time was very long, and when it was broken, his voice was low and troubled, almost trembling. "Lady," he said, "I cannot speak."

"I'm so ******** sorry. I don't know how to talk about it."

"I must stay, at least, until the seagulls come."

She almost couldn't muster the question. But she had told Nis that it was better to be callous and flippant than to tip-toe around the truth. "And after the seagulls come?"

His voice, at last, seemed to break - not on anger, but on some sort of repressed anguish. "Pray, Lady, if you - if you will have mercy on me, leave this question."

And yet she did not, pushing past him, willing to feed his pain, for once, for the sake of relieving hers. "It feels cruel to talk about it but it feels worse not to. I just don't - if I can make things easier for you - I don't want to just keep you here out of some selfish need to have you around-"

He broke in on her. "Is it selfish?"

She did not hear the shaken emotion in his voice as anything but a continuation of what it had already been. She answered, therefore, with more honesty than even she might have otherwise done, if she had stopped to hear the truth behind his question, and register where it came from. "Of course it is."

This, at last, seemed to be insuperable. He stood in silence, and she could not look at him.

"I need to ask you something else. You told me to stop being afraid of hurting you. I'm trying."

"I did say that."

She glanced at him, at last. She had once wondered if it was possible for him to shed tears. He looked as if he might, pushed much further, answer the question. It made her stomach turn. "That day in the storm - when Ekstrom was here." He turned, then, so that she could not see his face, although she could see the convulsive constriction of his throat in the instant before he did: a needless echo of a mechanical body's old reaction to feeling, now meaningless but inexorable. "I don't know if I'm just projecting my own feelings onto you. I need to ask. When that happened - what was it like?"

"If you have ever realized that you were having a good dream in the cruel moment before you awoke from it - that."

Her fears confirmed, she voiced them, finally: "It made it worse."

"Yes, Lady. I believe that it did."

"Because - because you hadn't hoped -"

"Yes."

"I thought so. I hoped I was wrong but I thought so."

"Why do you ask these things?" It might, some other time, have been an angry explosion. But it seemed almost to plead with her, helpless, as if he were an animal that she was subjecting to some inhumane experiment and who cried out against the treatment.

"I know they hurt. I'm trying to - be better - about coddling you - and by that I mean coddling myself, because I get upset when I upset you. I just had to know."

"Why?" He repeated it with an almost childish insistence.

"Because it was worse having to speculate. If I could - good God, if I could fix it for you, I would. Would it be worse again? If that second in the storm was a minute or an hour or a day, would it be worse?"

She regretted it as soon as she said it, turning to look at him as she did so and watching the godawful light of something that came close to being sudden hope - probably crueler, even, than the moment before waking up from a very good dream. "Do you mean -"

"No. I can't. But if I could. If I could, would it be worse?"

He did not answer immediately. He seemed to be thinking of it, turning it over, and when he spoke his voice strained to remain under his control. "Lady, I do not know. I spent an entire life without living. And I have often thought that I might die, and I know that time moves strangely in those moments. Perhaps, if I knew that I had only a minute, I might live that minute more fully than all the years of my life together."

Despite herself, she pushed on. "And then to grieve it, after? Just have to remember it?"

"Perhaps. But I believe grief is forever - always - the cost of living. So I have been told."

"It sounds like it would be worse again."

"And perhaps it would be. I cannot know." His voice broke, again, and stayed broken even while he valiantly pretended that it was not the case. He struggled through a throat just as thick with tears as a living man's would have been, his back still straight, his eyes still turned away from hers and sightlessly towards the painted walls. "But Lady, it cannot be more painful to me than to think of it with hope. And as I cannot think of it in any other way, after that storm - please, Lady, as you - as you have mercy at all in you - have done. I am not in anger against you. I do not retrench, where I asked you to speak freely without fear of wounding me. But for this question and in this hour, Lady, for the love of God, please have done. Please. I beg."

The nakedly vulnerable cry for mercy moved her, finally, to relent - as much because she was herself teetering on the brink of tears as out of any benevolence towards him. "Please don't. I won't talk about it anymore. I had to know. But if it ever changes - the wanting to leave - please tell me. I can - if you want to go back to the cauldron - I can -"

She was grateful, this time, that emotion choked him from answering immediately, as it gave her an opportunity to wrangle her own grief at the idea of letting him go, and returning to a Garde without even a dead man in it to speak to. When he did, it was with that same bow of his head, as if she had given him a command that he must, of course, yield to. "As you wish me to do so, Lady, I will. If it changes."

It felt stupid, now, to return to banal existence. But what else was there to do? Such was the way after every catastrophe: the world kept moving, and you moved along with it, willingly or no. So she fumbled, desperately, for what to say, and ran her hands over the seams in her blankets as if touching the real world - or this facsimile of it - would return her to it in truth. "What should we talk about? If I let the silence go we're gonna fill our heads up with the same thing. I can't sleep like this. We have to talk about something."

His own voice, likewise, was desperate, when he made a suggestion with half a cruel, dry laugh in it. "Tell me of what you were reading."

This she seized on with grateful alacrity. "I'll do one better. I'll read it to you. It's a - a poem - oh. It won't make sense. I'd have to tell you about Lancelot and Guinevere. You won't like it."

"Why not?"

"It's a love story."

"We all love to hear stories of things beyond our experience."

"Are you sure?" And her voice was level, when she said it, but the tears gushed out at last, unstoppable and unavoidable.

"Why do you weep?" And he asked it with a gentleness that she almost could not have believed him capable of, especially in the wake of a conversation that she had expected to leave him raging, as he often did. "Leave off the idea, if it is painful to you."

"It's just - I can't do it briefly. Never mind." She shook her head, regretting it now - regretting the offer, the questions, the conversation, the entire visit. "It's too long and my ideas about it are all complicated. I can't tell you succinctly, you know?"

She knew, rather than saw, that he was looking at her. If she had confirmed it with her own eyes she might then have seen a tenderness and a regret of his own that would have terrified her. But she was spared from everything but his answer, which came with his usual quiet, and reminded her that he had told her that he loved her voice: that her voice, at the end of everything and just as she'd often told herself, was the only one that could truly give him kindness or cruelty. "Then pray, Lady, tell me at length."