Chapter 21 #2
The appetizer came then: oysters on the half shell, served on a bed of chipped ice, gilded at their sharp edges with flecks of gold leaf.
Rosamund took one between two fingers, trying not to think of how the waiter must have cracked them open, of smiling knives and bleeding skin.
She tipped it down her throat, a swallow of lemon acidity and bitter sea salt.
She could feel Miriam’s eyes following the bob of her throat.
‘You aren’t going to try one?’ Rosamund asked her. ‘Too salty?’
Miriam pushed her plate towards her. The ship hit a wave, making the candle between them flicker. ‘Watching you is more than enough.’
Well, then. It wasn’t as if Rosamund needed to watch her figure.
She had Miriam’s oysters, too, licking the brine from her fingers afterwards.
The silence between them had grown so weighty that Rosamund wondered if it would plummet like an anchor through the floorboards beneath them, stopping the Monumental in its tracks.
The waiters took away their plates. Once they were gone, Miriam said, ‘This new age has made you more… brazen.’
‘It wasn’t the new age, Miriam. It was you.’
‘Me?’
Rosamund smirked. ‘Everything you did to me, as Esther… Well. There’s only so far you can bend someone before they snap.’
‘Is that what you’ve done, darling? You’ve snapped?’
‘I’ve shattered,’ she said. ‘And I’m better this way. I have sharp edges now. You can’t pick me up without getting cut.’
The waiter came in with the next dish: turtle soup, the liquid deep red with tomato and spices, chunks of pale meat sliced thin yet still gilded with fat. Rosamund ate slowly, closing her lips around the spoon with a languidness so obscene that Miriam laughed outright.
After the soup, the fish course was a red snapper smothered in hollandaise, its enormous golden eye clouded by death. Then the entrée: a whole roast pigeon stuffed with foie gras and truffle, laid on a bed of chestnuts and drizzled with cognac sauce.
Rosamund took a bite of the pigeon. It was exceptionally rich, coating her tongue with salt and oil and the earthy scent of the truffles.
She wondered at how, in every lifetime, she had been so exceptionally privileged—maybe if she’d made more of an effort to help people below her station, the world might’ve been less cruel to her.
But it was too late for such thoughts now.
She was eating truffles, wearing diamonds, and preparing to die.
‘Do you miss your past lives?’ Miriam asked her.
‘Do you?’
Miriam drummed her fingers on the table. Shadows spurted violently beneath them, as if the tablecloth had open veins.
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Will you miss me—Rosamund—when I’m gone?’
Her lips twitched. In amusement? Regret? ‘Yes. I believe so.’
‘But it is a sacrifice you’re willing to make,’ Rosamund replied, with false flippancy. ‘Like the pigeon on my plate—I might pity the creature, if I saw it living, but that wouldn’t stop me from having it for dinner.’
‘You don’t love the pigeon, Rosamund.’
‘As you love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s odd,’ Rosamund said darkly. ‘I think that somehow makes it worse.’
They remained in silence until dessert. It was devil’s food cake, to add insult to injury, served warm with a scattering of raspberries. This, Miriam ate, as if to spite her.
Rosamund hated sweet things; she didn’t even try the cake. She put her fork down with a clatter. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’
‘Yes?’
‘We both know how I was created,’ Rosamund said. ‘That night on the balcony, with blood and fury. But what about you? Where do you come from?’
‘With blood and fury,’ Miriam echoed. ‘I was made before Cybil’s era. Centuries before, I think.’
‘You think?’
‘I don’t keep time like you do, darling.
If I did, I would have driven myself to madness.
’ Miriam took up her fork between finger and thumb, inspecting the tines in the light of the candle on the table; then she spoke to her reflection in the steel.
‘I was a shadow, once—as I am now—but the sort of shadow that is everywhere, the sort that depends on the light to cast it. Then a group of mages offered me unimaginable power—enough of each of their souls to make me something more. I found a new form. I was freed from the tyranny of the dark.’
‘So, you were created by a deal?’
Dark eyes; a darker smile. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know the particulars—I never will—but they wanted a servant to do their bidding.
At the moment I was made, they had paid the price to bring me there, but not to bend me to their will.
That was foolish of them. I killed them before they could tie me to their service. ’
‘You murdered your creators?’
Miriam grinned, dropping her fork with a clatter. ‘Does that upset you? If we owe our makers favours, Rosamund, then you owe me infinitely.’
Rosamund looked away. ‘I don’t think of you as my creator.’
‘Your destroyer, then.’
‘My reckoning.’
‘Are you afraid to die, Rosamund? To truly die, without resurrection?’
It seemed pointless to lie. ‘Of course I am.’
Miriam put her elbow on the table, extending her palm to the sky. In her empty hand, the shadows swirled, then a shape materialised: an oyster knife, chillingly familiar in its silver gleam.
‘Then end it now instead.’ Miriam extended her arm, offering the knife to her. ‘Wouldn’t that be the solution? End it again, before I take your soul, and find another life to live. Perhaps the next one will bring you the meaning you crave.’
Rosamund stared mutely at the knife. The ship rocked gently beneath her feet. In the next room, the pianist trilled the highest notes; there was a muffled round of applause.
After a few moments, Miriam closed her hand around the blade. She dropped her arm, expressionless, even as black blood began to drip from her palm and onto the tablecloth.
‘But you won’t,’ Miriam said. ‘You will never end it yourself. Why would you? We both know it won’t make a difference. You could have as many souls as stars, my love, and all those lives would be as unhappy as the first.’
Rosamund forced herself to give Miriam a bland smile.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I am surrendering to you. Did you forget that, Miriam? Our war is over. You don’t need to convince me anymore.’
Miriam scowled. She poked the oyster knife into her cake, leaving it there, handle pointing to the ceiling. ‘It doesn’t feel like a surrender.’
‘What does it feel like, then?’
‘Like a tragedy on a stage,’ Miriam said. ‘You and I, wearing our masks again, playing pretend.’
Rosamund felt it, then, more keenly than she had in years: the weight of the mask, somehow heavier for the imminence of its fall.
She watched Miriam’s eyes fall to her lips, her neck, the glint of the fork in her palm.
The Monumental rocked and groaned with the anger of the sea beneath it, the piano silent in the other room.
And around them the darkness, their constant companion, was quiet and still—as if the night itself was holding its breath.