Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“I do not casually cast away useful implements,” Mab said calmly.
“I take excellent care of the tools with which I work, like any craftsman. When you came to me, your home had burned to the ground, your woman had lied to you about what was most important and all but sentenced you to death by doing so, and you were in the process of leading yourself, and your apprentice, to some vague but undeniably dramatic form of self-immolation. Not only that, but the very White Council you looked to for protection had done little but use and threaten you for years on end.” She gestured around her.
“Now you are the master of a heavily defended castle that stands where your boarding house once did, capable of protecting you and your offspring. You are engaged to a wealthy, powerful, desirable woman who respects you enough to tell you the truth, and your former apprentice occupies a position of power, which gives her a sense of purpose and has rendered her immortal to boot.” Mab looked at me and eyed me up and down.
“You are in considerably better personal health and physical shape than when you came to me. And you are free of the White Council of Wizardry, fully capable of charting your own destiny without their constant manipulation and interference. I am many things, wizard, none of them kind. But I am an excellent liege. You have given me your oath and I have returned your faith in kind. Your life has improved in every way, since you swore yourself to my service. I defy you to tell me that it has not.”
I opened my mouth to argue and…
…and just couldn’t.
She was right. Or at least she wasn’t wrong. Mab wasn’t really human. She had been once. She understood some things. She remembered some things. But she didn’t feel them anymore. She didn’t feel loss.
She didn’t miss Murphy.
“You’re thinking of Ms. Murphy,” Mab said quietly. “You mourn her still.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She was a warrior born,” Mab stated. “She chose to face fear and death as a regular habit. She chose to go into battle. She died there.” Her voice grew softer. “She was a woman who knew her mind. That had nothing to do with you, wizard.”
“It had something to do with you,” I said, even more quietly.
Mab became creepily statue-still. Her eyes glittered.
“The banner of your will,” I said quietly. “You sent it out for that battle. You took fear and pain away from those who stood to fight.”
“Yes, I did.”
“She’d barely been able to walk,” I said, my voice growing slowly, volcanically hotter. “She would have stayed somewhere safe if she hadn’t been able to move. You made it possible for her to go out and fight that night. Didn’t you?”
“I provided the means and opportunity for her to make a choice,” Mab said without inflection. “Just as I did for hundreds of other souls who stood to the city’s defense. I did nothing to coerce her choosing.”
“You knew what she would do, given that opportunity,” I spat.
“I strongly suspected,” Mab said calmly. “She was who she was.”
“Did you strongly suspect she would die in that battle?” I said. I think I was shouting. My vision was edged with red. “Did you set her up to die, Mab?”
I said her name properly. With intent. I’d heard it from her own lips, after all. A shudder rippled over her, quick but visible, a reaction that had been forced from her, by my words, by my will.
If I’d slapped her in the face, she’d have been less enraged.
Her expression did not change by any movement of muscle or skin, by any reposition of the features of her face.
It simply grew bleak, bleak as a pitiless arctic chill settling over stone.
There was a crackling sound as frost spread out from her feet in a rapidly accelerating circle.
It began climbing the bookshelves and covered the windows, darkening the room.
My breath began to plume in front of my mouth in the freezing air.
“A great many mortals died that night,” Mab said quietly.
“A great many of them gave their lives to limit the civilian casualties, as you well know and remember. All of them took up the defense of this city with my support. All those who died, died in part because I had supported them.” She leaned forward, her eyes cold and bright.
“Exactly as you did, wizard. How many did you lead to their deaths? Do you lie to yourself, tell yourself that none of them had lives, had families, had those who loved them who will miss and mourn them? Just as you mourn her?”
I stared at her, my rage scorching the inside of my belly—while my heart suddenly went cold.
Mab lifted her chin.
The chill in the air eased slightly.
“I did what I did because Ethniu had to be defeated,” she said.
“Your life was expendable. Ms. Murphy’s life was expendable.
All the lives of those who fought were expendable.
They—you—were expendable because the chaos that would be caused by Ethniu’s victory would have drowned all the world in demons and blood.
I make such choices because no one else is cold enough and no one else is hard enough.
It is only your arrogance and pride that make you believe I would have had the time or attention to spare a thought for you or for Ms. Murphy or for something as fleeting and ephemeral as your emotions when doing so.
” She inhaled slowly. “What is the phrase? ‘Get over yourself.’ It was war. She died. You survived. That is the whole of it.”
Mab’s eyes grew heavy-lidded. She stared at me for a long moment.
I broke the gaze first, looking away from her. I was shaking. I think I was crying.
“The first time one raises the banner of her will,” Mab said, speaking very slowly, “it is an unsettling experience. Feeling so much pain. So much death. Being with them in the moment of their passing.” She closed her eyes briefly and took a breath.
“It pleases me that I was not there with you, my Knight, for your death. But I was there for hers. Felt her fear. Her frustration. Felt how desperately she wanted to tell you what was in her heart. She had the courage to face gods and monsters. But not what was in her own breast.”
“She loved me,” I whispered.
“Perhaps,” Mab agreed. “I was not privy to that part of her. But it would be consistent.” She inhaled slowly, and when she spoke again it was in a voice of absolute authority.
“We will regard your…outburst, with Our name, as an unfortunate aftereffect of your use of a banner of will, and given that it is your period of mourning, and that We were in privy council with you, We will overlook this disrespect.” She turned toward the window and said, “If it happens again, wizard, your suffering will be drawn from the darkest caverns of Our imagination, and We will consult with Mother on ways to make it worse.”
I felt myself start shaking.
Mab wasn’t looking at me, but her cheek rounded, and I could picture the cold smile on her face. Then a frozen gale wind and a blast of snow threw open the nearest window, and Mab was gone.
I stood there in the cold for a while, breathing, shuddering, just feeling the fires cool inside me.
Then I went to find Will to have him get some people into the library with towels.
Frost all over the books. That hadn’t been called for.