07/13
word count: 3900

The uneasy sleep had been a blip.

Or so, at least, she told herself - if for no other reason than because it gave her the satisfaction of thinking that she had conquered it through sheer force of will. The fact that she had started using the pretty little sleep masks was undoubtedly a coincidence.

And why not use them? It had become a pleasure to subject herself to the nightly rigors of her skincare and her hair routine, and then to change out of her schlubby sweats and into something needlessly slinky and don the beautiful little mask like putting a satisfying seal on the day. Nocturnal as she was, they had been a blessing in keeping out the light that made it between the cracks in the blinds.

It was this meticulous self-care routine, she reasoned - against her own judgment - and nothing else. Which hadn’t stopped her from saying otherwise to Almadel, in a moment of self-awareness and honesty.

She turned one of them over in her hands, considering what he had said, and thinking herself an idiot. She’d looked right at a diagram for the damn things, and she had considered the peeling gilt of the mural’s blindfolds an artistic license, not a literal depiction.

Leaning over, she blew out the candle burning on her bedside and put down the book she was reading, and for reasons she could not fully understand she balked before - as suggested - turning the blindfold around, putting the embroidery towards her eyes.

Maybe she should have tried it at first on the Garde. The last thought she had was a sudden recollection of what Gouvernail had said: that it was the reward of doing the duty of the Garde well, to sleep soundly.

Ridiculous. If that was true then the duty of the Garde was in having a pleasant little ritual at the end of the day to bask in.

If that was true, then the duty of the Garde -

- the Garde was -

the Garde was lit by a strange golden hour, and the walls were intact, but seemed in some way wrong nonetheless. She leaned against a rampart, her hair tossed in the wind - and why was her hair down? She hated having her hair down; this entire damn thing had started because her hair was down - and she looked down at the bailey, and with a hazy sense of wrong she watched the bustle of all the men below - busy with ambiguous work, going to and fro; noise and smoke that lit the place up with life like she had often imagined it.

Too much like she had imagined it. The gap between her idle speculation and the Garde before her was non-existent. This isn’t real, she thought.

This is a dream.

There was no defense against such an idea. No sooner had she thought it than the world swam away from her. She sat up in her bed, yanking the blindfold away, inexplicably afraid.

She was startled, when she picked up her phone and saw that she had been asleep for almost five hours. She felt as if she had barely closed her eyes - exhaustion still hung around her - and after a moment she rolled the mask up, thrusting it with violence into subspace and rolling back over.

When her alarm went off, the interlude of waking up was vague, hazy, ill-defined. The dream, however, was sharp as a knife, and felt as dangerous.

—

She was still bleary-eyed when she arrived at the Garde, and was quietly grateful that she hadn’t tried her little experiment on a work night. Better to be a little cranky and lethargic around Gouvernail - whose disapproving looks could be imperiously shunned as they always were - than offer up a subpar performance for a client.

“I brought you a present,” she said, after the usual ritual of their greeting had been gone through. He had already dropped his eyes with a curious glance to the lute, and startled at this addition.

She prayed, silently, that Almadel had not simply tricked her into being cruel. She knew nothing of the man but somehow felt like it might very well be the case, for the pleasure of laughing at her imagined failure and a poor dead man’s imagined bewilderment.

“Lady?” he asked, in that way he had of voicing his confusion without daring to give a name to it.

She held the instrument out to him and he only looked at it, and then lifted his eyes to hers with that same half-wounded expression.

“You did it with the boat,” she prompted, trying to sound detached while her stomach roiled. “Take it.”

He hesitated. He had as much as told her, before, that he quailed before the pain of trying and failing. It occurred to her, with a lurch, that perhaps he was only afraid of doing so where she could see it, in doing what she had commanded him to do.

“Did I,” she said, still mastering her voice, “or did I not tie that ribbon around your arm, at your own offering? Did you or did you not say that the Garde yielded to me? Take it,” she repeated, more firmly and insistently.

And so, with a sort of helplessness as if compelled, he reached out, and to his visible shock - her own suppressed - he did.

Relief surged over her - along with gratitude for this wonderful avoidance of cruelty, this wonderful clearing of her conscience - as he took it gingerly into his hands, and in silence they watched the strings appear, wrought in the same silvery haze as his own self.

“Where did you get it?” he said after a long pause, very quietly.

“Funny way to say thank you,” she said.

“Thank you, Lady,” he said, with a promptness that, again, somewhat turned her stomach. This was hewing a bit too close to an awful script that she knew too well, but before she could steer it away he added, in a mild tone of playfulness that suggested that he, too, was uncomfortable with the sudden intimacy of the moment: “You have done a little miracle. Sainte Lalaine.”

“Don’t canonize me,” she said immediately, although she laughed. “You’ll regret it, when I tell you that I got it for a pittance and that I only got it to keep you busy. I thought it might pass the time, if you have something to -”

To learn, was what she had been about to say. But the ghostly quill materialized in his fingers even as she was speaking, and when he applied it to the strings it was not with the air of a bewildered novice, but with an exploratory familiarity. She fell silent, watching his spectral hands as his experimental plucking settled, and then turned into a few notes that she recognized, instantly, were a sort of offering to her: sweeter, certainly, than Grieve’s drunken rendition; much sweeter still than her own off-key attempt to nettle him.

I remembered, they seemed to say, and she had to swallow a sudden painful sensation in the bottom of her throat, something between grief and panic and joy.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said at last, “that you knew how.”

“It was a part of my education,” he said simply, but the notes trailed away, and he looked back to her with sudden uncertainty, and for once - at least for once when unmotivated by shame - she could not meet his eye, and turned to go down to the bailey, letting him fall into step behind her.

Of course it had been. He had been a rich man, after all, and not always so destined for the battlefield that something else might not offer. It was probably a valuable skill to have, in a world where there was not a catalogue of all the world’s music at everyone’s fingertips - a matter-of-fact thing, without the ceremony she, in the modern day, might feel if asked to perform. Naturally, then, if someone was told to play or sing, they would do so, just as easily as they might pass a cup of water that was asked for. A thing without baggage.

Except the baggage that she had just, in her heart, put there.

She was tired, she realized again; suspended by that little revelation, the exhaustion returned on her. “I’ll swing the whip a little bit,” she said calmly. “And you can pluck away at that thing instead of nagging me about how I clearly haven’t been practicing.”

He did not answer, and she at last dared a glance, expecting to see there his tired resignation to her disgust with him. But he was not looking at her. He watched the ground, and she saw, in the faintest upward turn of his lip, an expression not just of indulgence but almost of exultation.

He knew, then: knew that she had been moved not solely by this selfish desire to distract him, but by a need to give him something, anything, beyond her own half-hearted and often broken kindness. She felt, again, that strange swell of relief and gratitude at an avoided cruelty.

The plan to swing the whip did not last all that long, as the combined forces of bad sleep and the novelty of watching Gouvernail do something human - as that is how it seemed to her - eventually slowed her arm, and at last she opted instead to simply lean against a bit of crumbling stone in front of the gatehouse and watch the lizards running over it while she listened to his playing, which seemed to be ranging in no order that she could discern from one sort of tune to another. The idea that he was, perhaps, doing something like reminiscing was uncomfortable.

“Did you like playing it?” she asked suddenly, and he suspended his notes, letting his hand fall as he considered it. “Or was it only a part of your education?”

“I did not find it burdensome,” he said at last, and she wanted to snort a sarcastic rebuttal, but she was too exhausted to find the willpower.

“I thought maybe you didn’t do anything for fun.”

“You have made this clear to me, Lady,” he said.

“You never seemed to want to set me right.”

“Why trouble myself? You take pleasure in holding opinions which are not true,” he said.

“Only when they’re about you,” she retorted, and he smiled again, but he did not answer, instead folding his arms atop the lute and leaning on them. He looked shockingly human in that posture - almost boyish - and she turned away from him again, to watch one of the lizards seeking out a patch of sunlight that moved as the wind tossed the ivy.

“I had a dream,” she said at last, not even sure if she should refer to it. “About this place - like maybe it was once. Like I think it was. Like those pictures I saw, but more. And there were - people everywhere. I know that it was a lot of - of fighting and bloodshed and - and all that. But it wasn’t all that, was it? Sometimes, maybe -”

He was quiet. “Yes,” he said finally. “Sometimes.”

“It was too beautiful to be a shrine to dying,” she said, with a certain impatience as she turned back to him. But he was looking elsewhere, his eyes turned to the ground as if seeing, in the ruined tiles beneath her feet, the opulence that they had once had. “It’s - it should have been different. Every ********’ wall and ceiling and even some of the stupid floors have all these - happy scenes painted on them - all hunting and festivals and - and love - and for what? For you to look at them and feel bad about what you can’t have?”

“To remind me of what others do have, by way of peace.”

“Which it’s somehow your entire job to keep.”

“Not solely mine. But my entire job, yes.”

“So - what? You decide you don’t get any of it, so everyone else can have it?”

He did look at her, then, with an expression of gentle bewilderment, as if an alternative had never occurred to him. “Yes, Lady,” he said. “So that everyone else can have it.”

“You tell me I like having opinions that aren’t true, but so do you,” she said at last, not with angry fervor but with sudden resignation. “You could have had both, if you’d bothered to try.”

She had told him, once, that he had never known what it was that he wanted. The comment undoubtedly hung between them now in memory. “Why, Lady,” he asked at last, weary, “do you continue to wound me with this same idea?”

“Because I want to hear you say you regret it. Not regret it like oh, it’s a dead place now, you shouldn’t do what I did. I want you to regret it because it was an alive place then.”

Silence stretched, awful and interminable, and still his eyes roamed vacantly over the tiles. “I regret it,” he said at last, and for a wretched moment she wondered if this was nothing but a further yielding to her will. “I regret that I had not your strength of will, and I regret that I have ever considered that strength a weakness in you.”

“This isn’t about me,” she said impatiently, but he cut her off, with gentle violence.

“I know. But it is a comparison I cannot help but make.”

She was quiet, waiting for the guilt that did not come. This was cruel, but it was a necessary cruelty, for reasons that she could not explain to herself. She seemed to feel, in some way, some soul-wound painfully debrided, to heal more cleanly than it had before.

“It was an alive place, as you put it,” he said. “I was conscious of it. I might have shared it, if I wished. If I had known myself enough to wish it. And now, Lady,” he finished, weary, “will you have done?”

She could not answer immediately. She had to think about it, to consider it. “Maybe,” she said finally. And then: “I think the Code is cruel, to put you in a place like this, and make you look at a museum to people enjoying their lives and make you think you could never have it. I think the Garde is cruel,” she added, with a sudden impulsive epiphany. “They put joy in the ******** name, and then give you a bunch of violence. I think -”

“Lady, pray,” he said, with a quiet plea. “Do not spend your anger this way.”

“Fine,” she said. “But I don’t care what you think about - about joy and the Joyous Guard not being able to coexist.”

“Do I believe that? I think I did once. But perhaps now it is only one of those untrue things that you like to believe about me.”

She watched a bright bird light on the ramparts, opening its beak to break into noisy song. “It’s not even really dead anymore,” she said, feeling the lie of it when she said it.

Of course it was dead. The proof of it sat across from her, all hazy insubstantiality in the sunlight. Even the lute-strings had to exist as ghosts of themselves for him to get a sound from them. Gouvernail, the manifestation of her failure to resurrect the place entirely, who had made himself a dead man while he walked among the living beauty of the Garde and discarded it, and who was now - in the way of ghosts - tethered to its beautiful corpse. This awful grief-riddled spirit in all its ineffectual regrets, stirring in the skeletal ribcage of what had once been a thriving shrine to beauty and pleasure.

“No,” he agreed.

(And he looked at her: her flushed cheeks, her wind-tossed hair, the restless movements of a figure that seemed formed for indulging in the simple and beautiful pleasures of living - with all the quick anger and quick laughter and quick grief that could only belong to an Alive thing, who guarded her Life like a lioness defended her cub - the beating heart of the Garde’s stirring body, whose defiant willpower was the blood that filled its slumbering veins and forced it back to breathing, thriving vitality - and he did not think that he lied when he said it.)

“It is not dead anymore,” he said.

“I need to sleep,” she said at last, exhausted, and she turned towards the chapel.

He did as he always did, standing at the foot of the stairs, his back politely turned as she dressed. She knew, in her heart, that she had planned for what she would do here. If she hadn’t, she would have brought Petitcru along with her.

He watched in silence as she went through the rest of her new ritual for rest, and said nothing as she procured the blindfold from subspace and, after a pause, turned it embroidered side in, and covered her eyes against the sunlight streaming in from the windows above.

“Sleep pleasantly,” he said, turning to go.

She had told him, once, that she always slept well when she was not at home.

The Garde was still - probably to his continued relief - not her home.

The Garde was still -

the Garde was still lit by a strange golden hour, and the walls were intact, but seemed in some way wrong nonetheless. She leaned against a rampart, her hair tossed in the wind - and why was her hair down? She hated having her hair down; this entire damn thing had started because her hair was down - and she looked down at the bailey, and with a hazy sense of wrong she watched the bustle of all the men below - busy with ambiguous work, going to and fro; noise and smoke that lit the place up with life like she had often imagined it.

Too much like she had imagined it. The gap between her idle speculation and the Garde before her was non-existent. This isn’t real, she thought.

But she could barely hold the idea for a breath before it escaped, driven out by one distant figure in particular: a little taller than most of them, moving a little bolder. Green and gold and umber brown, and even at this distance she thought that she could see the greying wing waving over his temple, and as solid as anyone else: alive, then. She leaned forward again, and she eagerly called out his name. No dreamlike silence strangled the noise: it rang out clearly, but no one below seemed to react to it, and especially not him.

This isn’t real, she thought again, and then: he would have looked for me.

She paused, swallowing the urge to call out again, and she turned instead towards the river, and thought that if she could get to higher ground she would see the distant wings of white sails on the horizon.

But why, she thought, are there no seagulls, even in my dreams?

Her dreams. This was a dream. But the realization did not catapult her out of it and back into her bed. She reached out a trembling hand, and she touched ivy cresting over the rampart, and felt the cool surface of the leaf on her fingers against the sun-warmed stone, and it did not shift treacherously.

Numb, she moved without thinking down the stairs, forgetting Nail, forgetting the men at work, and she went through the chapel - where incongruously her bed was still laid on the altar, as it never could have been when this place was alive like this - and down the steps into the corridors below, torches in their sconces lighting as she moved past them towards the crypts.

Here, she turned, and she looked at the mural splashed on the wall across the archway: unfaded, untarnished, bright in flamelight too clear to be real: the knight and his lady, reunited under the wheeling night sky. Had those bits of gold scrollwork at the bottom always been there? Had she only not noticed them? They curled in two ornate flourishes, glittering in gilt. The masks, of course, cast aside by two lovers who had found a way to be together despite the distance. United, as Gouvernail had said, in dreaming of one another.

“Oh,” she said aloud, somewhat stupidly. And then she laughed a weak little laugh. “I thought it was a metaphor,” she said to no one in particular - perhaps to the two figures with their clasped hands, too joyful in their reunion to have responded to her even if they could have.

The walk back to the chapel was accompanied by a strange, buzzing awareness. She paused at the top of its stairs, and leaning against the threshold she watched the busy activity in the bailey, looking - she had to admit it - for a figure that did not appear. No one seemed to notice her, but she did not attempt again to draw their attention. She watched the banner waving from the roof of the keep, and those fluttering in the open windows, and finally, when she had drunk her fill of everything beautiful and vibrant, she turned and, moving slowly, she put herself into the bed.

“I want to wake up now,” she said, and the Garde, accordingly, yielded to her.

So she awoke, opening her eyes to the golden glow of afternoon sun that made its way through the blindfold even as it slipped from her face. That strange little wisp that had been so persistent in following her hung near her head, but in a placid stillness, for once, its light gently pulsing in the rhythm of the fanning wings of a butterfly at rest.

Halle had said that a Wonder seemed to repair itself, and she had seen inklings of it herself. She looked at the frescoed ceiling that had been only irregular chunks of dull plaster a week before, and which now looked as fresh and vibrant as if it had been painted yesterday. A week before she had thought, from what she could see of it, that it must depict a woman laid to rest.

It was an odd place for a painting: no one could see it clearly, except something laid to rest on that very altar - as she currently was, like the sacrifice she refused to be. But it was an even odder choice of subject. A dead woman might have made sense suspended above a chapel, but there was a flush in the lady’s face, and her hands were not folded across her breast but beneath her blooming cheek, one of them clutching at a lock of hair, as if she had gotten into bed but been too reluctant to relinquish her hold on it. Not laid to rest, but laid down to sleep, and gently smiling.

Sainte Lalaine, she thought. Doer of tiny miracles.

For a long, long moment she lay still and looked up at the sleeping figure above her and listened to the sound of music coming down from the sunny courtyard above in what - for all its reality - might as well have been a dream.