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For weeks now - even before she had begun walking her dreams - there had been a rising hum of consciousness in her, struggling to be heard above the daily anxieties of both Elaine Carlisle and the Joyeuse Garde. It was a persistent feeling that she had something she ought to be doing and was forgetting. Some appointment she had forgotten to pencil in; some assignment she had forgotten to complete.

She did not, at first, go to the Garde. For the first time since she had awakened, she turned away from that feeling of a door opening within her soul that told her that she could return to that place of old ramparts and fallen glory.

There were things to do here, at home: home, of course, being the real world. New music to listen to, new papers to read. Food to try. Long walks with the dog down little shaded paths where the heat wasn’t more oppressive than the riversides were beautiful. Reckless dates and ghosting text messages from brown-haired men with little streaks of grey at their temples.

She returned to the Garde only once by dreaming, and she did nothing but sit in the great and empty hall, staring blankly at the opulent spread of pleasurable imagery and considering, again, whether this had all been intended merely to punish the keeper of the castle or if it had been an encouragement towards those good things that could only be had in times of peace.

Probably people had enjoyed good food and told funny stories to one another while Rome was collapsing around them. Probably she couldn’t hold herself responsible for anyone’s peace or pleasure but her own.

The restless static grew louder and angrier, until she sat up in bed one day and with the abruptness of a scene change it stopped. She rose mechanically to obey the sudden instinctive knowledge of what she needed to do, moving without thought to arrange a dogsitter - an emergency, she lied; she wasn’t sure how long it would be needed - and drop Petitcru off.

That was the thing, wasn’t it? You got handed little lives to be responsible for if you weren’t careful, and you always had to gently rearrange your own around their constant demands. The peace would not come to you if your conscience was waging a constant war, and like so many other wars, your participation was a conscription that you had not asked for but could not neglect.

He met her, of course. He always did.

She looked at his outstretched hand, ready for the unthinking greeting, and she could not lift her own into his ghostly fingers. She considered them with a sudden rising tide of hatred and resentment, as she had once felt when up at three AM watching Petitcru battle for her life, wondering why she had let herself get invested in a thing so fragile and so utterly beyond her control, and which she had not even asked for.

“Lady?” he asked, alarmed and hurt, but she could not answer him. She met his eye with an exhausted blankness, and she turned to walk away from him in silence.

Down, towards the dark. Through her makeshift bedroom with all its cozy touches. Past the muraled corridors in their ancient impressiveness, alone. He had not followed her.

Down the winding stairway, and to the pillar in the center of that dismal room. As before, she rotated it, and she was not surprised when she was met with nothing but silence from the pulsing light within. She reached through the glow towards what she knew, somehow, was there, and she closed her hand around the fragile crystal - so like the other that she had held before, in a memorable time of trouble and unwilling self-sacrifice, but as different as all of them must be. She had not thought of what it would look like, but it made sense - of course it did - that it had the color of lifeblood, and that, as she closed her fingers around it with gentle firmness, they glowed with that same awful vitality.

And then she moved - the word should have been dreamlike, but that was not a term that she could ever use again in the way that it was meant to be used - and so she moved in dreary, compelled numbness through the silence in her head towards the room of stone boxes.

She stood over him, looking down at the dusty cloth that masked the skeletal face beneath, and for a long moment she considered merely crushing the thing in her hand - even devouring it, as she knew that agents of Chaos could do - and putting an end to his misery. That was the other thing, wasn’t it? You got handed the care and keeping of these little lost souls and the best thing you could give them, sometimes, was a good death.

Too late for that, she thought blankly.

It was not a good way to think of a man - a human man, full grown, who had made his decisions and had lived and died by them of his own will. It was a cruel way to think of a person, a soul. He was not a pet for her to make decisions for.

All the same.

If the Garde was hers - if, as he had said, it yielded to her - it ought to yield to her completely. These half-measures were unacceptable, and seemed to suggest some sort of fomenting rebellion being whispered by the walls themselves against the totality of her rule. And she was not merely the ruler of this place. She was the Garde, name and all, and she would prove it however she had to. She had not asked for it and had not wanted it, but as with many unwanted responsibilities, she refused to perform with only half of success.

She moved the crossed hands aside, ignoring the sickly sounds they made as she forced the time-frozen elbows into bending; ignoring the sensation of the bones and leathered flesh crumbling within the rich sleeves. And when she had made a space, she put the precious thing that looked for all the world like a living bit of blood onto the ribcage, and she pushed. Gently, at first, and then - when nothing happened; when the crystal did not vanish with the sick relief she had felt the first time into the body beneath it - harder, and then violently, tears rising amid choked noises she had not realized until that moment she was making. Grief was displaced by rage at the futility of her own actions, but she pushed again, until her fist broke through the ribs and desiccated flesh beneath, until she had shoved the starseed down to the bottom of that awful box and had been saved from crushing it by the cushioned velvet the corpse reclined on, in some laughable imitation of the kind of earthly comfort he had never even allowed himself to relish.

She told herself that she would not cry - an admonition too late to be useful, as she already was - and stood choking herself down to silent mastery, her hand cupped over the fragile little thing that had an entire man’s many lives in it and gleamed through her fingers in the blackness with the color of pulsing blood.

It was not what she had come here to do, and so her failure to do it would not hinder her for more than the time it took for her to steady her breathing. It would - like many other tasks before it - keep for some stronger version of herself that did not yet exist.

She turned, then, leaving it where it was. Propelled by that same thoughtless instinct that had brought her here she climbed into the next box over, where there was no quilted velvet to receive her, and she curled up on the stone, clutching at the blue veil that she knew somehow had been laid out to cover her own dismal mortality one day. She stared blankly ahead, and then with mechanical movements she drew the mask from subspace, and she bound it around her eyes, dream side in, and waited in the blackness for sleep to take her - and imagined the thrumming crystal that was somewhere within her own chest, with this life at least in it, and perhaps others as well.

—

Strange and silent creature that he was, he could likely have bought and sold her and everything she owned, were they for sale.

She held his unresisting hand and looked over each one of his rings - a princely item on each finger, it seemed - and considered the brightness of gems and jewels against the dye stains on her fingers. He submitted to the examination, and then to the searching touch of her rough hands, as he had submitted to her wordless instructions for labor. She had formed an idea of him last time, before she had known what he was, but the lack of any shared language between them kept her from voicing it. His obvious wealth and power ought to have kept her from asking in some wordless way now. But she did ask: pantomimed slipping a halter over his head. When she tugged, then, on the invisible lead rope, he moved in instinctive obedience to its imagined restraint, his eyes on hers, and the movement at the corner of his mouth seemed to tell her: yes. Exactly.

Why should she protest, if this strange and nameless knight had come back to her this time in his fine mail and on his fine horse, moved by some idle fancy to bend a knee to her for a night or two? Even now they sat beneath thatch that he himself had laid under a sweltering sun without complaint, in exchange for a scrap of her rough bread and a pile of straw in a stable that still smelled like goat. Who knew what sort of velvet and satin and fur he slept on, in whatever luxurious place he called home? If it pleased him, in his capricious whim, to lay his head obediently down on her narrow pallet, why should she deny them both the pleasure?

She had not thought him given to tenderness. Gentle, to be sure. She herself had had nothing of tenderness to offer to any man, let alone a stranger from whom she had wanted only labor. But he reached up and with fingertips nearly as work-rough as her own he touched, lightly, that discolored patch of hair at her temple, where she was forever pushing it away from her face with dye on her hands. She, too, could be gentle, if she could not be tender, and as she took his wrist into her hand and steered him away from a movement too kindly, she smiled her benevolent forgiveness, and showed him the right way.

–

No. That was another time. Another life.

She looked down at her hands, work-rough and stained by their many dyes, and instead saw them only pale and manicured, as they ought to be. That was, also, another person. She lifted her eyes from them to the scene before her.

The Garde, above all things, was a beautiful place.

It was more beautiful in dreams even than in waking. The bright pavilions were spread below her in the bailey, and she leaned over the ramparts and watched the fluttering pennants, and amid the preparations for celebrations and revelry she heard the distant sound of a lute being played. With a kindly heart she smiled on her tiny kingdom and all the promise it had within it.

Not only a castle, a keep, a Guard.

The only window that had survived those thousand years had, after all, been panes depicting a scene with love in it: not just love, but romance - proudly indulgent, proudly frivolous. It caught the light, now, scattering a morning beam into green and gold.

Not just beautiful. Joyous.

Ah, she thought, as the elusive awareness of several weeks suddenly collapsed, as if exhausted, into a neat and recognizable shape.

She turned, then, and was not surprised to find herself looking at that piece of the Code that ought to have been below. The dream never operated as it ought to. The Code, of course, was not real, any more than the pavilions and the banners. But she found herself speaking to it anyway, unmoved by its motionless silence.

“I got it all backwards,” she said. “Not about you. I still hate you. But I got the name of the place backwards. I never wanted to wear it. I never wanted to be the Garde. He wore that name. But I never did, did I?”

She paused, looking past it and towards the distant river, and at the empty sky above it.

“I will bring the right name to him. I will not let this place have a dead man at the heart of it when he wants so badly to be alive. It was cruel to let him die without ever letting him know he had it backwards when you could have. I don’t care if it’s impossible,” she said. “I’m going to keep trying anyway, because something being impossible never stopped me before. He calls me a saint, you know. Because I can do miracles. I won’t let you take it from me. It’s mine now. I am this place. It’s not the Guard, if it's me. It’s Joy.”

The music was a distant and very cheerful strain. A song she recognized. The air seemed to promise hunting and laughing and delicious things. It seemed to promise, at the end of sunlight, a pair of waiting arms and a bent knee, and the indulgence not of love but romance: a triviality that in the moment of its existence meant everything.

She turned towards it. She did not want to look at the hateful Code, when so many more beautiful things were around her and more worth looking at. She knew that she would see him among the pavilions below, and she did: not in the emerald and brown of the Garde, but in pale blue and scarlet and golden thread. And he saw her, too, in that moment - did not look through her, as he had in every other dream, but met her eye and moved towards her with a sudden desperate urgency.

“I’m not afraid of doing impossible things,” she repeated as she held out a hand to beckon him, and this time it did feel dreamlike, in all the many complicated and contradictory meanings of the word as she now understood it. “It was always supposed to be Joy.”

He met her moments later at the top of the stairs, and it was not a surprise that he flung himself towards her waiting arms. But she had already seen him growing pale; had already seen him becoming, again, one with the silver air. Her frantic clutching could do nothing; she did not close her arms around anything solid. What had felt before like an inevitable reward to her realization now retreated to be as remote as it had ever been.

“Stay,” she said, and when this did nothing she summoned her own power, blossoms erupting around him and scaling his limbs, lacing their way through his hair. “Stay,” she ordered desperately. The starseed was in her hand again somehow; she shoved frantically towards his ribs and met solid resistance that gave way a breath later to nothing. It was cruel to give him a command that he could not obey, but she gave it, her lips parting silently around the word again.

“Don’t. Please,” he said, trying to close his hands around hers; only half-succeeding. “Please.”

He always thought and acted quicker than her. She would be grateful, later, that he thought and acted quickly now, and with the last heartbeat in him seized her clutching hand with a final desperate effort of reality, and crushed her fingers to his lips: a violence and a breath, felt. Some enormous cacophony erupted over the river -

She awoke in the dark beneath the Garde, plunged into silence with the arrival of consciousness. The touch of his breath whispered away from the back of her hand, and she opened her fingers to look for the starseed like a bloodstain there, and found instead within her palm the shape of a lover’s knot illuminated in the color of sunlight.

She heard the noise by the time she approached the chapel, perceived through the ivy-choked openings in the walls high above her; it was growing clearer as she fumbled up and into the bailey, but she already knew what it was. She scrambled gracelessly up the stairs and onto the ramparts, and he turned towards her, rising from where he sat, the lute dangling uselessly from one hand. He had been turning to look at the swarm of seagulls milling above them as they streamed towards the river, the sky noisy with their clamorous life.

She had wondered once if a ghost could truly weep. His face was an obvious answer. He reached out a hand towards her and she tried to take it, and she tried to ask him a question, but even if she had been able to be heard above the riotous calling of the seabirds she could not find the voice to speak at all. He seemed to read the question, however, in the shape of her mouth: closing his hand around the space where hers was, unfelt, just as he had done when he had tried to still her frantic efforts to push his life back into his chest.

“Yes,” he said. “It was. I was.” And then, his voice breaking around a tearful smile that he turned on her with more benevolent kindness than she could ever have been capable of he added: “Thank you. For the seagulls.”

For a moment, there was only the oppressive and choking joy of knowing that he had, for whatever brief moment, succeeded in doing what he had tried to do from the first moment of giving his kindness to her - that she had succeeded in giving him that kindness back - and for a delirious second she thought that he might, again, bring his lips to the back of her hand. That she might even be able to throw herself into his arms, as she had once before sobbed for the useless wanting of.

But his fingers passed through hers. It was - she had said it herself - impossible. That one brief miracle, perhaps, had been as much as Sainte Lalaine would ever manage.

Beneath the calming sky she fell to her knees before he could do the same. The truth of the Garde was now, as it had once been, that joy frequently has to be bought at the dear price of struggle, and is often to be had only incompletely, at best, making those fragments that we can lay hold of more valuable by the absence around them. Amid the reminders of what she could not have, in the wake of dedicating herself to the enjoyment of what she could, she gave way at last to the relief of unresisted grief.