12. Tabitha
Tabitha
I can’t sleep after the library, so I do what I always do when I can’t sleep, which is go looking for a book, except my library is the size of a cathedral and full of demon history I can’t read, so mostly I go looking for company.
I find them in the room with all the chairs, the one I’ve decided is the snug even though nothing in this grim mausoleum is remotely snug, arguing. The four of them, sprawled in the firelight, arguing about me, which is their favourite hobby after keeping me alive.
“...too soon to plan a route,” Azaan’s saying. “We don’t even know what Mordecai’s stronghold’s defended with.”
“So we scout it,” Luka growls. “I’ll go, I’m quiet.”
“You’re a four-hundred-pound cat on fire, Luka, you are not quiet...”
“Room for a small Queen?” I say from the doorway.
They shuffle up without being asked, and I fold myself into the middle of them, into the warm, and Gavriel drops a fur over my legs because he’s noticed I’m cold before I have, the way he always does.
“Can’t sleep?” Valerian asks.
“Brain won’t switch off. Too many demons after me, not enough answers.” I nick the cup out of Azaan’s hand and drink from it. It’s some hellfire spirit that nearly takes my head off, and I cough while they laugh. “God. What is that, paint stripper?”
“Firewine,” Azaan says, delighted. “Takes getting used to.”
“It tastes like a house burning down.”
“That’s the good stuff.”
I settle deeper into them and, because I can’t sleep and I’m tired of being frightened, I make them talk.
Not about the war. About before. About the realm as it was, back when it was more than a hellscape you trek across on foot.
And they tell me, and it’s the first time I’ve really asked, and I realise how much I’ve been running through this place with my eyes shut.
Valerian tells me the realm wasn’t always cruel.
That under a true Queen it was decadent, yes, dark, yes, but alive, a place of revelry and heat and wild beauty, fire-gardens and night-markets and music that could make a demon weep.
That the ugliness came after, when it was sealed and starving and leaderless, three centuries of a realm with no heart.
That a claimed Queen could make it that again. Could make it thrive.
“So it’s a fixer-upper,” I say.
“It’s a fixer-upper,” Valerian agrees, mouth curving.
“With really bad plumbing and a lot of murder.”
“The murder’s negotiable, under the right management.”
I look round at them in the firelight, my four impossible men, and at the great cold beautiful room, and I try, I really try, to see it the way it could be instead of the way it is.
A realm that thrives. Mine to build. And for a second I almost feel it, that current, the realm leaning towards me, hopeful, waiting.
Then Tabeitha shifts, sour, and whispers, you’ll never build anything, little bitch, it was mine, and the feeling curdles. I shove her down and drain the rest of the firewine to burn the taste of her out of my mouth.
“Right,” I say, standing before the dark can catch me. “I’m going to go not-sleep somewhere more horizontal. One of you lot coming to make me?”
“All of us,” Luka says, already rising, “coming to make you.”
And they do, and it’s very effective, and for a few hours at least I stop hearing her at all.