23. Revenge
Chapter 23
Revenge
“You have no difficulty speaking?”
“Only a little,” I replied to Victor quietly. In truth, only a little was becoming a little more, and I wondered if until this moment the struggle and the escape had only distracted me from the effects of Gremio’s spell. “Not enough to stop me.”
I heard him chuckle again, the low sound mingling with the rumble of the carriage-wheels over the city street. Yet I knew well enough by now the shape of his body (so much as I could discern despite his clothes), the way he was wont to carry his broad shoulders, to question whether he was truly so at ease. In the way he could not entirely commit himself to leaning into the black leather seat, I sensed in him rather a nervous tension, dulled only by the half-exhaustion of our recent peril fading further into the past with each London streetlight that passed us by.
“Sit against the side,” he nodded to the far end of the bench seat, opposite from his own, pulling his scarf down from his steel mask again and moving aside his black cloak. “Lay your legs across. I need to bind your ankles.”
“In your lap, sir?”
A foolish question, and I regretted it as soon as I heard my voice speak the words: it sounded to my ears at once too intimate and not intimate enough.
“Yes.”
If that is your will , I had fully expected him to say, or Correct, that is the most efficient , or some other manner of reminder that I was free to depart from him as I pleased, or that I was to remain at arm’s length, and that never (not once, not ever) was I to mistake his words or his actions for anything more than the cool propriety of a professor.
And so I wondered for a moment at that bare yes —and then, my mind drifting, whether beneath the back of my black veil I had still all of my hairpins that he had collected and returned to me in the emblem-carved box—and then I wondered if I wondered too much.
If he were indeed a mortal man, he must have felt some measure of weariness as well—though even now he remained stronger and more vital than any man I had known, I could not mistake that the look in his dark eyes was as tired as I had seen him—and perhaps, in that state, he had passed the point of patience for the niceties of a language that I knew was not originally his own.
I shuffled myself across the seat, away from him, watching with a strange anticipation as finger by black leather finger he loosened and removed the close-fitting gloves from his strong hands, revealing the scarred olive skin I had come to know so well.
He had pulled his scarf down again, and so I unveiled my face. I wondered if he should think it strange or rude that I kept my shoes on as I let my legs settle across his broad, warm lap, not knowing if to remove them would have been to presume too much or too little. But it was not until my ankles came to rest over his firm right thigh that I realized I had stopped my breath: I became aware of a faint, tingling heat rising through me, heightening the sensation of my nerves at the place where we touched—followed by a cold half-shiver when the powerful muscles of his upper leg flexed almost imperceptibly under my ankles’ pressure, and I was struck by the fleeting terror of the notion that he knew what I had felt.
“Relax,” he grunted quietly behind the cruel steel mask; whether it was an answer to the shift in me, or a mere statement in itself, I cannot say. Either way, I was scarcely able to do as he asked: I watched him press his fingers carefully between the wounds, not troubling himself to remove either my shoes or my blood-damp stockings, and as I felt the familiar darkness of his sorcery course through my flesh, I flinched at the sudden sharpening of the pain in my legs.
He stopped, looked to my face, and then repeated the same.
I turned away, allowing myself some shred of privacy to clench shut my eyes and bite my lower lip.
His long silence drew my gaze, and I opened my eyes to see him unsheathe his iron dagger and proceed to cut a strip of fabric from the bottom of his black cloak.
“What about you, sir?”
He looked up from his work, the light of a passing street lamp flashing across his mask.
“Are you all right, Victor?”
“I need to apply pressure for the ride home,” the sound of him cutting and tearing long pieces of cloth from his cloak was unusually loud over the rhythms of the street, “because I do not keep the entire contents of my medicine cabinet in my coach.”
“I don’t mean that I thought it strange. I mean rather to ask whether you are injured, or tired, or…”
“Surprised,” he replied, winding the torn strip of black cloak tightly around the lower part of my right leg, from my ankle to my knee. I felt myself wince. “Surprised, and betrayed. By that damned horse-face,” he added belatedly, darkly, as he readied another of the makeshift bindings, “not by you.”
“I know I broke the circle, sir,” I stated, my plain words slow, “though I did not mean to do so. I shall not apologize, not after you instructed me more than once not to do so, but I wished for you to know that I understand what I did.”
“You broke the circle,” he nodded, and from the mild cock of his head I wondered if he was partly amused by my confession. “And then you cast with me a new one, more powerful than the first.”
“I cannot imagine he had such a thing in mind when he crept out of that stone door in the hill.”
“No,” Victor replied, a kind of wry pride in his voice, “I assure you that he did not. He did not wager on your nerve and your strength, nor the power of your art, neither on its own nor in combination with mine. Quite the surprise for him—I am sure he found it thoroughly disarming .”
He made me laugh just as he began to wrap my other ankle, and I could not help but think that he meant purposely to distract me from the pain.
“Permanently dis?—”
I stopped mid-word, overcome by a sudden monomania on that single consideration: he made me laugh to distract me from the pain.
The very thought touched my heart.
It was my own ragged state, I told myself; it was the accumulated shock and exhaustion of all that I had Seen, all that had come to pass, that obliged me to fight back the first secret tears that stung the corners of my eyes. It was the mental travail of it all—and now the physical pain, my defenses having relaxed enough to allow its trespass—that caused me to seize upon this sole thought, this feeling, and for it to fill my breast with a melting warmth that left only emptiness and hunger in its wake.
An impossible sensation: one absurd, bitter, brutal pun should not break the heart.
It was not that he allowed his strong, rough hands ever to concede to overt comfort as he ministered to my injuries, but that he could not seem to make his touch entirely ungentle; it was not that he spoke careful pleasantries to soothe my mind—perhaps he knew that I would find such vain words as vapid as did he—but that he failed to entirely conceal the unconscious warmth at the edge of his voice, if he recognized it in himself at all.
After being caught fast again in those powerful arms, held so tightly and so close that not even that wild horse of Hell could pull me away, I was cold against the far side of the carriage seat. My ankles were in his lap, and yet we were too far apart.
I leaned my head against the inner wall of the carriage as I watched him, letting the rattling growl of the wheels over the road vibrate gently against my skull, too tired to care to turn away.
Could he feel my gaze? Could he sense my mind? Did it matter anymore?
In that moment, all that I wanted was to love him. To rest my cheek and my hand against his chest again, and feel his strength around me and his shadow through my blood, and listen to the pulse of his heart fall into rhythm with my own.
But if desire draws disprites, was it this very hollow in my heart that summoned Gremio from the door in the hill? And if desire draws disprites, was it my desire again that aided my call to the elves of the lakeside in our time of need?
Was that why they followed us in procession, as for those moments of uncanny awe we seemed to lead the whole host of the twilight lake?
Then Victor knows , I thought to myself, sighing at the depths of my own horror and relief.
Then Victor knows my desire, try as I may to hide its fire from the light, and he knows that in my desire I imperil our every step.
Must love be death for us, and I alone its fatal cause?
He began to pull the makeshift binding tighter around my ankle, pausing when I flinched, resuming again a degree more slowly.
And what if—thought thrilled me, warmed me, allowed me a terrible, desperate hope—what if the disprites were drawn not only to my desire, but to his own?
And if that were so—I held my heart close, even as it leapt at its reins—if that were so, was the threat of Gremio’s hoof-falls stalking at our heels the reason for my vow of strictest celibacy?
And if Gremio were gone now—dead (so much as a demon could die), or maimed and driven away?—
“Permanently disarming, sir?” I repeated in full at last as his strong hands paused in their work, allowing me a moment to breathe. “Is Gremio…”
“—Banished? Gone for good? No. No, he is not.” Victor paused, and I felt my heart sink. “His magia intrinseca is powerful, and his hands will regenerate in time—if Absolon can slowly grow eyes for the first time by his imagination and his will, do you not think that Gremio can restore two newly-lost hands?—but we will likely have a respite from him for a little while. Several weeks, perhaps.”
“ Weeks? ” I answered, my reply swifter and more incredulous than I meant for it to be. “Is that all?”
“ Is that all ,” Victor echoed me, “ after all that? ” He paused, finishing what little was left of wrapping my leg. “If he remains in the hollow hill beside the lake, brooding and gnawing over his defeat, too ashamed to show his horse-face in the infernal cities below lest they usurp his title and laugh him out of Hell itself—in that case, it may be longer, yet he will be nearer all the while. If he instead descends back to Tartarus, and convinces his followers and liegemen to stand by him and support his recovery with their own art, we may not have long at all.”
“And in the latter case, I suppose all of Tartarus will be after us.”
“After me ,” he corrected, “though perhaps not you. Gremio’s own pride, ironically, might shield you from the wrath of his people. It will be embarrassment enough for him to claim that he was relieved of some extremities by the infamous mortal sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco. I do not imagine he will be eager to regale his followers with the tale of the Novice Sorceress who startled him twice—first with a burst of faerie fire, then with cold iron—and successfully appealed to his fellow disprites to pin him down, and played a part in severing his wrists, and came within an inch of kicking the self-proclaimed Grand Duke of Tartarus in the face.” He laughed, really laughed, at this last part: still an ominous, almost evil sound, self-satisfied and nearly dark enough to conceal its hint of warmth.
I risked a tight smile as I looked to him.
“By his estimation,” Victor continued, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial rumble, “you were quite, shall we say, out of hand .”
Then I allowed myself to laugh a little, but not for long—the bindings seemed to be finished, but then he wrapped a broad hand firmly around each of my ankles, and with the warmth and pressure of his touch came a terrible wave of his sorcery through my lower legs again, intolerable in its dull ache even as it stung with a sharp pain that flashed white before my eyes. I heard myself bite back a cry—I felt my own body try to wrench my legs away from Victor—but his grip was inexorable, and only when I heard the pounding of my heart slow in my own ears did I feel him ease his strength. I did not attempt to draw away again. The warmth and weight of his hands relaxing on my legs was a strangely profound comfort, and I wondered whether he worked some secret art through me again, this time to console the pain, or whether I felt only the magic of his touch in itself.
“I shouldn’t like to laugh anymore at your jokes, sir,” I managed as my heaving chest began to calm, though speaking was more difficult than I expected, and I wondered whether he could tell the difference. “The outcome has been rather unpleasant.”
He nodded, and when he replied, his voice was low. “I imagine so. I have done all that I can for now—cleared out the worst of it with my art—but your legs must be kept warm, and they and your voice require a particular combination of herbs I do not have with me. Traffic is lighter at this time of evening, particularly in the snow. It will not be long. You should rest, if you can.”
“Do you mean to put a spell on me?”
“No. You will not need one.”
I sighed quietly, allowing myself to settle more comfortably into the black leather upholstery of the corner of the coach. “At least we’re safe for a while, I suppose.”
“For a time. But he knows now the strength of your art,” Victor murmured quietly, removing his torn cloak and laying it folded for warmth over my legs and his lap. Without the cloak I could see that his clothes, though somewhat disordered from the escape, fit him well: so far as I could tell in the dim, unsettled light, his waistcoat was of black silk damask, somewhat askew; his rumpled white shirt fit closely over the contours of his solid form, darker where it clung here and there to his sweat-damp skin. “And while his pride may spare you from the wrath of his legions, it will not spare you from his own. At least you have the advantage of him not knowing your true name.”
“I don’t suppose I know his either.”
“Gremory,” Victor growled, nearly under his breath. “His true name is Gremory. That is why all of the false names he gave you creep so closely around that one.”
“The same Gremory I read about in the old grimoires? I suppose I should have suspected him at once by the similarity of the names he gave, but two of the books you lent me claim that Gremory appears to the summoning sorcerer as a woman riding a camel.”
“And what did you See?”
“I don’t entirely know, sir. A pale, horse-like man, most often, but also a rider on a strange steed—I suppose that might have been the camel—or a rearing white mule that belonged somehow to the sea. I thought that I caught a glimpse, once, of his truest form, and if so then I should think him a kelpie , the dreadful faerie water-horse from the old ghost stories my grandfather used to tell: I thought for a moment that Gremory had a horse’s head, and feet with cloven hooves, and great webbed claws for hands…”
My stomach turned at the memory—the cold, wet, clammy grip; the dead, severed hands still frozen around my legs as they smoked from the wrists—and I said no more.
Victor nodded. “Then you have Seen him with greater clarity than the writers of those grimoires did. In the course of his long existence, he has taken many forms—you will learn in time to sense where the old tales converge, and where they part—but I doubt that he has often been a woman riding a camel. A camel soliciting for a rider would be closer to the mark.”
“Soliciting?”
“That is how we met. In my travels, some years ago, I was betrayed and marooned amid the barren dunes of the great Sahara by the light of the full moon, listening as the night-ghouls began to stir and shuffle in their sandy tombs. I needed a camel to escape and survive. And he, knowing a desperate sorcerer when he saw one, was the camel who arrived.”
“For a price, I shouldn’t doubt.”
“Correct. With Gremio, there is always a price—and yet, more often than not, that price is the procurement of some trivial man-made gewgaw he covets. Another so-called treasure for what he refers to as his museum.”
“Is that why Gremory wants the Talisman now? In return for getting you out of the desert?”
“Call him Gremio, for now,” Victor responded slowly, after a pause. It was cold in the carriage—I thought that the sound of the street was changing, and I imagined the wheels churning through a fine layer of fallen snow—but he was correct that I required no sorcery for my body to relax: under his folded cloak, held between his scarred hands and the heat of his muscular thighs, my feet and lower legs were so comfortably warm that I forgot almost entirely about their lingering pain.
And yet, even in so pleasantly languid a state, I could not help but note that his reply did not answer what I asked.
“Or call him Gregory Emory,” Victor continued, “if it suits you. But save his true name for the last spell we cast on him together. The next time you or I utter the name of Gremory ,” he rumbled, a dark power gathering in his deep voice, “will be to banish him back to Tartarus, and seal him in his own city for the next century. For four or five centuries,” he added with a growl, “if I can manage it—after what he did to you.”
After what he did to you , I repeated in my mind as the words warmed with a terrible surge of hope; I spoke quickly in reply to hide my heart, but I could not hide my smile. “Then he is the one we’re going to banish together,” I said, watching Victor incline his head in a slow, grave nod. “Then your revenge and mine become the same?—”
I caught myself: I felt the weight of his gaze on me deepen; I saw his dark eyes flicker like fire in the dim light.
I had never told him of my revenge. I had never so much as whispered the word to him until now.
Out of an old instinct, I stopped my breath. Let him believe my revenge begins only now , I thought hurriedly to myself—a futile, silent spell; let him think I mean only to strike back in return for these wounds— and then I let my eyes close for a moment as slowly I exhaled.
No. He could know. And he should know. So accustomed had I grown to the outworn taboo of my revenge that I nearly laughed at myself to revisit it. Karvonen had patiently hidden his disdain when I mentioned my revenge to him—I could think only of a gentleman bestowing a stretched smile upon the capers of a well-bred but untrained dog—and my friend Iris outright cautioned me against not only the pursuit itself but its very name, imploring me to tell no one else, while at the same time Rothfield nearly retreated from my side. For all their kindness to me in nearly all else, the Order did not look kindly upon my purpose.
And the same Order, and those same three members of it, looked less kindly yet upon the dreaded Doctor D’Arco: a summoner of demons, an ill-starred wanderer, a harborer of outcasts—and now, if only they knew it, he too was a seeker of revenge.
Yes, I would tell him: the time had come, and more than come, if he did not already know. Surely he heard my outburst, had he not, when the realization struck me that the quarry of my long, blind hunt stood before my very Sight? When I threw myself forward at Gremio—against all hope, against all reason, against all of Victor’s impossible strength—and lost my footing, and broke the circle.
“Your revenge,” he repeated simply, as if on cue, and I could not help but smile again.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my voice quiet but certain. “I told you, that night in the spiritualist shop at Witch’s Corner, that I sought to learn magic to understand my husband’s death. It was a polite fiction, but not far from the truth. I sought revenge, sir, though I did not know how, nor against whom—revenge not for my husband, but for myself. The man I married left me with nothing—nothing but the Talisman. And in his death I became powerless against him, against the poor document of his will that took everything from me, against the interminable indifference of the law.
“But I could seek to avenge myself upon whoever took his life, and who in doing so set into motion this fall from all I had known. My revenge gave me purpose, sir. A guiding star, burning in the night when all my life was adrift on a ruthless sea. I could be as ruthless. It gave shape to the darkness.”
He watched me with a slow, strange look in his eyes, and beneath the folds of his cloak I thought I felt one of his strong hands tighten subtly around my ankle.
I fought back the fantasy that I had moved him—that something in my words had pierced through his shadow and muscle and bone to touch his heart.
“It was magic that made me feel alive again,” I continued. “But no, I should not say again after all—it was magic that made me feel alive, as never I had before. I might have forgotten my revenge, and indeed there have been days when it scarcely crossed my mind. Yet it was a promise I made to myself, in a time when the world promised me nothing, and therefore I did not wish to forget.
“And that is why I broke the circle, though accidentally, when my fury overcame me. Once I knew that I stood before the monster who killed my husband—who stole my old life away—I could not hold myself back.”
He said nothing, but he nodded deeply, shifting his weight as he leaned against the back of the upholstered seat.
I felt my stockinged feet flex inside my shoes: if I had not known better, I would have wondered if the unconscious change in the grip of his hands on my legs was a surreptitious caress.
“My art,” he intoned, “was my own revenge. That is how I, too, began.”
“Against whom, sir?”
“Against the tyranny of the common. Mine was the thrust of a single sword—sharp, swift, and alone—against the slow, placid advance to tame and civilize the wild country of the soul.”
A tear slipped unbidden from my eye, falling toward my cheek, and I struck it away with the black sleeve of my dress as I stifled a single sob. I could not let him see me like this—I could not! But he pierced me to the heart, before even I knew for certain if I had drawn blood from his: it was the thought of him alone again, as I had imagined him lying down for the night in a lonesome bed while I lay alone and apart in a cold guest bedroom, his old water-stained grimoire clutched desperately against my breasts; it was his impetuous pride to stand against the turning of the world and fight a losing war for no more and no less than the principle of passion itself; and it was all he did not say: he did not abhor my vengeance, did not condescend to pretend it did not suit me, did not draw away as one singed by a black flame.
He did not seek to change me. He did not hold me back. He held me closer, subtly but certainly, and made the fury of his art a mirror to my own.
“I’m sorry, sir.” I wiped my eyes again, quickly and stoically as I could, willing it to be for the last time. “It’s beautiful, is all.”
He grunted softly, allowing me some measure of privacy as he faced forward, the lights of the city beyond the veiled coach windows glancing across the steel of his mask.
“You might’ve been a poet,” I continued, mastering the slight breaking of my voice.
“I might have.” Beneath the narrow brim of his hat I saw him raise his black brows, his massive shoulders settling as he exhaled. “I have known a few, in my time.”
Yet he looked nothing like a poet at all—not with the burning eyes, the armored face, the great, brutal body shaped for war. I looked to him as he looked ahead, and after all the horror and endeavor of the escape from Gremio, he had yet a vague air of audacity in the way he held his head: a young man’s defiant pride to challenge to the very road that stretched before him, reckless of the thin veins of silver that streaked his black hair. Not his top hat, nor his crooked waistcoat and watch chain, nor his sweat-damp white shirt—none of his disheveled gentleman’s attire, which seemed more a costume on him than ever did his midnight robes—could alter what I saw. He was again to me the black knight whom I watched spar with Forsythe, invincible in his bravado, his hands that grappled demons battle-scarred; a villain and a hero, who led me open-eyed to dare every danger and yet protected me at every turn, at greatest peril to himself—who turned to face Gremio at my command, and held me tight against his hard body, and defended me with all his strength as the very night around us seemed to throb and tremble in the grip of his potent art.
“But it will require more even than a poet’s sorcery to protect you now. To fulfill the confluence of our revenge.” He turned to me, and I did not need to see those burning, brooding eyes in the dark to feel the weight of their gaze fix me nearly in place.
I did not look away.
“I thought we nearly had our revenge tonight, sir.”
“Nearly.”
“Then why didn’t we…?”
“Because you are not yet prepared, though you are closer even than I suspected. The delay, though unfortunate, is necessary—you do not yet know the specifics of the procedure, and must further build your endurance, both to my sorcery and your own—but Gremio will not make it easy to try again. He knows much of my power, but until tonight he did not know yours. Now he does. We escaped him, but he escaped us, as well: and so he knows that already, even tonight, our art combined is nearly a match for his own. Do not doubt that he will seek you in some fashion—either to destroy you, or simply to keep us apart—sooner than risk an encounter with the both of us again.”
He must have felt my body tense, or seen the slight wince of pain in my face at the renewed sensation in my lower legs.
“Though it seems no more than a pat aphorism,” he continued, “particularly in light of all you have Seen and experienced tonight: do not be afraid. He is afraid of your sorcery, because he knows now how formidable you have the power to become. You will heal, you will come into the flourishing of your art—and then you will make him understand what it means to fear.”
“Some comfort, I suppose. Is it true what he said about the Eve of May? That the contract is for you to bring him the Talisman by then?”
“True?” Behind the steel mask, I heard Victor chuckle bitterly. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Then we banish him before the midnight of Walpurgisnacht—the night before first day of May—so you don’t have to play his game and give him the Talisman when he’s already broken his own rules?”
“Correct.”
“That’s three months from now. I don’t imagine he’ll like to see what I can do by then.”
“No,” Victor replied, “I do not imagine he will.”
“But what happens, sir,” I mused, “if the timing doesn’t work? If May comes, and you don’t give him the Talisman, and we haven’t managed to banish him yet?”
He remained silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his deep voice was slow and even: “I die.”
Those two words struck me like a blow to the chest.
With the rhythm of the carriage wheels and the hooves of the horses, with the warmth of my lower legs wrapped and held in Victor’s lap, I must have slipped into a dream that shifted suddenly to nightmare. The words made no sense, and they circled again and again through my reeling mind until they became no more than meaningless, inarticulate sounds.
I closed my eyes—I do not know for how long—but when I opened them again, nothing had changed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I whispered at last, “I must have misheard—perhaps I am more tired even than I thought myself. I cannot tell whether I heard it in a dream or in waking life, but I thought that you said…”
He said nothing, and I knew he was watching me, waiting.
“I thought you said that—that you’ll die.”
“Those are the terms of the contract. I do not intend to uphold them.”
“But I don’t understand,” I replied, my words quick on the heels of his own, and I heard the unsettled urgency in my own voice. “Why enter a contract with him at all, at such a terrible price? If it isn’t to settle with him for getting you out of the desert—to repay the price he set on saving your life, when you had no other choice—what then? I cannot fathom what he could possibly have, sir, that you require and could not win for yourself. From what I can tell, you do not seem to lack in sorcerous power, nor health, nor wealth, nor knowledge, nor?—”
“Time.”
I shook my head, shivering suddenly in the cold until I felt the touch of his shadow sift through me, warming me again.
One of the carriage wheels hit a loose cobble, sending a mild jolt through my bones and stirring again the lingering pain Gremio’s claws had left in my legs. Victor’s scorpion cane clattered between his knee and the side of the coach.
But Victor himself was as still and solid as a standing stone, a wave-beaten rock in the sea, and it was impossible to think that I had heard what I thought, in my strange state, that I had heard: that when the moon reached its apex to begin the month of May this mountain of a man, this implacable force of nature, would crumble into the tides of time.
That Victor would die.
Time.
He had made a deal with the disprite Gremio for time .
“You made the contract with?—”
“With every intention of breaking it.” His voice was a low rumble, fearless and alive. “It is not my first time. And it will not be my last.”
“That’s why you take apprentices, then. Because you need to teach someone to banish Gremio with you before the time is up and the contract comes due.”
“Correct.”
“And we have only some three more months…”
“If he does not succeed in destroying one of us before then. Yet I will ensure that he does not.”
“Three months,” I whispered again, forcing myself to think, though the effort of it and the unfathomable shock of Victor’s revelation tired me, and my thoughts began to blur. “Three months. Then—for the time it must usually take to ready an apprentice, based on all you’ve said to me of my own progress—if I don’t seem that I’ll be ready in time after all, or if something… were to happen to me…” I paused. “You wouldn’t have time to teach another.”
He nodded, and the look in his dark eyes was grim.
“Then I’m your last chance, sir.”
“To put it in your terms,” he began, but the distant air of fondness in his words grew hollow, and his voice grew grave. “Yes, Elizabeth. You are my last chance.”
In my fervid mind I clambered to understand, struggling for every scrap of comprehension like a seaman grasping for flotsam from a ship dashed apart by the seething waves, desperate to raise my head above the water long enough to catch some promise of the long-forgotten shore.
“No,” I shook my head, “no, it can’t be. Every time I think I have it, every time I build this thing in my mind it falls away again—a foundation built on sand. How can it be that you bargained for time , when you are surely young enough that to die in May would make for a life cut short? And why trouble yourself to select and teach an apprentice to banish Gremio with you, when you could fulfill your end of the contract—and live—simply by giving him the Talisman he covets, now that you know its whereabouts? There must be something more, sir—something I don’t understand about?—”
“Because the Talisman will not be the end of it,” he interrupted me, firmly yet without malice. “Because now and again in a man’s life there comes a time when he must make his stand.”
I think I only sighed as I rested my head against the black leather upholstery again, my thoughts in such disarray I could scarcely find how to right them anymore. “I will stand with you, sir,” I managed, unsure if I understood all to which I agreed, and less sure yet that the details mattered. “But for now I must rest, after all. Maybe in the morning this fog will have left my mind.”
“Then rest,” he said, wrapping his torn cloak closer around my legs.
I closed my eyes, haunted by the notion of time and the fatal first of May, and dreamt of Victor’s windblown phantom vanishing into mist and snow, leaving only the terrible afterimage of a moon-pale skull.