CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #2
The pair of them led Sy to his room, where Mira waited.
How long had he been in the garden? He regretted that he had kept her waiting at all – he hated not to be of use.
Since his transformation, tracing the passing of time proved a maddening exercise.
Knowing each day would look like the last, eternally, a minute might as well be a month, each day a decade.
No matter that he counted the sunrises and sunsets with a longing he could not quite pinpoint.
The servants marched silently through the austere gardens into a skeletal gallery, then along endless empty hallways, Sy trailing behind.
Their footsteps echoed on the bare marble floor.
There were no carpets, no paintings on the walls, hardly any furniture.
The only decorations were enormous gray polished vases, clear cut glass flowers on stone tables, silver-lined mirrors upon white walls.
Everything spotless, orderly, gleaming, silent. Including the servants.
He imagined how a more ambitious despot might use his magic: desiccating farmlands, draining reservoirs, flooding cities. Entire populations as subjugated as the land, made as devoted to their sovereign nation as Mira’s thralls were to her.
He was right to keep this magic away from the king. He was not entirely certain he was right to bring it here.
But there was another reason he’d done it, and he tried very hard indeed not to think about that.
Despite the way it drew his eye beyond the gate. Despite the way it made him count the sunrises.
No, he could not regret his choice, nor could he regret what he had lost. What had he lost, after all? But his imprisonment – no, his choice – might be easier to forget – if, somehow, he could snap that last, lingering cord. Could bring himself to want to.
If he could stop himself from seeing her face in every flower, every cloud, every tree. From wondering where she was. If he would ever glimpse her outside the gate. If she was safe. If she was smiling. A thousand years would pass, and he would never stop wondering if she was smiling.
The hideous footmen left Sy in the doorway to his bedchamber, where he forgot all else, taking a breath to admire his mistress’s great beauty before interrupting her.
He wondered for what purpose she had summoned him.
Except at night, she largely left him to his duties.
Today, she dressed in a glowing burnt orange suit.
A short, mink-lined ivory cape draped off her shoulders.
He noted the earring she wore: gold-plated and carnelian leaves of laurel wrapping up her ear.
It did nothing for the blue of her eyes; but that was not why she wore it.
Seeing her, now, he was filled with delight. Delight – and, inexplicable, choking grief.
“There you are,” Mira said, not looking up. “What took you?”
The grief dissipated. “Apologies, my lady – I should have expected you. To what do I owe the honor?”
She flicked her fingers lazily, indicating he should come closer. “Scribbling again?”
Beside her, he watched her sift through his papers, alert and attentive. He at last had time and energy again to draw. The result: pages and pages of endless pines.
Trees were all he could seem to conjure.
Listlessly, she dropped the page she was holding. “You know, when you arrived here, I thought having a human familiar – well,” she smiled, “somewhat human – would make for better company. But I do believe the fox was chattier than you.”
He opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could she placed a finger over his lips, stopping him. She reached out and lightly stroked his pale pinned hair with the tips of her fingernails, careful not to muss it.
“Fortunately for you,” she said, voice softening, “I didn’t come to chat.”
Grazing her fingernails against his jaw, she tilted his chin lower; closed her soft lips over his.
Instantly, automatically, he returned her kiss, placing his hands on her waist. Hers was hungry; his carried all the passion of the cold cut stone under their feet.
She placed her other hand on his chest, then slid it lower, over the crotch of his trousers.
His body reacted – not to his desire, but to hers. It was not that he did not desire her – it was that he had no desires, except hers. He felt the urge to please her, but only the urge of a tool. Mechanical, mercenary.
Somewhere in the swallowing murk of his mind, he knew, with burning clarity, this thought was his: it gave him some small relief to know himself, if at all.
She knew it, too.
And it grated her.
“Sylas, my sweet,” she said, pulling away, her voice soft as snow. “Every night you come to my bed, and yet you are cold as a dove in winter. Am I not beautiful to you?”
“Of course, my lady,” he reassured her. “You are more beautiful than any other.”
“Do I not hold your heart in my very hands?”
He took those hands in his. “You must know I am yours, body and soul.”
Pleased, she smiled. One fine hand drifted to rest over his heart. “Then why is it, no matter what I do, I cannot make it beat faster?”
For this, he had no answer. It was not a command. He could keep his tongue still.
He did.
But he could not outplay her. She made the rules.
“Tell me,” she commanded. Then, to soften it, “I do not wish to be cruel to you. We are to be companions. I want to know what it would take to please you. Truly.”
“Only what pleases you, my lady,” he said, happy to reply honestly; then, a dizzying flutter of rebellion in his chest at her pinched expression. “Nothing else.”
After a moment, her smile returned. Hand still over his heart, she dug a pointed fingernail into his chest, hard, harder. It punched through cloth and flesh like the skin of a plum, staining his white shirt red. He did not flinch. He had grown accustomed to her bloodlust.
“Look at the mess you’ve made,” she said, sucking her finger clean, staring at the red spot. “Change, at once.”
As he pulled a clean white shirt over his already healed chest, she returned to shuffling through the nearly identical pages of ink-drawn pines on his table.
“Skies,” she murmured scornfully. “It’s good to have hobbies, I suppose.” Suddenly, she stopped her shifting. She plucked a sheet from the pile, pinching it between her fingers like the tail of a dead mouse. “What is this?”
A drawing. Same as the others. “Trees,” he said vaguely, adjusting his buttons. “My lady.”
“No.” She stalked over to him and pressed the paper to his chest. “This.”
He took it. Between the lines of trees, etched into the pine needles, into the spaces in-between, was the impression of a face. A face, despite himself, he saw in every tree, every cloud, every flower.
No. No he didn’t. “I–” He had no script for this, no prepared response. “I did not intend–”
“You really didn’t know,” she said with a stunned laugh. “My skies, you are pathetic.”
“I’ll burn them,” he suggested. “I won’t draw again. I shouldn’t have.”
She snatched the page back and tore it in half.
Eyes blue as the sky, as empty and as endless, bored into him.
“I grow weary of this tug-of-war. But I can be patient. You were quite frightened when you first arrived here, weren’t you?
Confused. Your tiny little heart pattering like a rabbit’s.
” She drummed her fingers against his chest, rapidly, and this time, he did flinch.
“Do we think a few years in that state would make you more or less insolent?”
Years. Before, he’d been trapped for less than an hour.
Less than an hour to dream of what dreaming once felt like.
That dangerous flutter of rebellion would be tamped completely after only a day spent in that state.
A day with no color. A day of utter, maddening sense.
With his clawed foot chained to the cold floor.
But a day was like a decade, and he and Mira had decades to spare.
He would do anything not to feel that way again. But there was nothing he could do. Not even regret.
“Yes,” she purred, stroking his hair. “Less, I think.”
He did not beg; there was no point. He would need to use his own magic, of course.
It isn’t so bad, he thought, stepping toward the silver perch. There is a window, after all.
But something outside the window stilled him. Something small and vibrant, a red and brown dot moving purposeful and lithe through the stolid gate.
Someone. A man approached the manor.
“By the skies,” Mira taunted, stepping beside him, as infuriated as she was intrigued. “Something can make that stone heart of yours flutter.”
“A visitor. A man,” he said, eyes trained on the red shape. “I’ve come to understand guests are…unusual.”
And that any who crosses your path meets an evil fate.
His head throbbed. He shook the thought away like a troublesome gnat.
“And that you don’t care for them,” he said, turning away from the window.
“On the contrary.” Mira clasped her hands together, smiling.
“My house is getting full to bursting, so I don’t think I’ll keep him.
Let me think. I will fill his lungs with bees.
No – I’ll turn his feet to slugs, then lace the path outside with salt before sending him away.
” She considered the possibilities, pressing a pointed fingernail to her lips.
Sy hesitated. Throbbing. Not a gnat, this time. A swarm.
“Clever ideas, Your Ladyship,” he managed around his pounding head. “Though, it may be that he has only mislaid his path. If we send him on his way–”
“Quiet,” she commanded.
He shut his mouth.
Then opened it again. “My apologies. I was only attempting to be chattier,” he explained. “My lady.”
Her nostrils flared. “It does not matter why he is trespassing, only that he is. Go. Bring him to me.”
Flustered, he went. He couldn’t fathom the source from which his insolence stemmed – except that he did not want another soul to end up like him, or worse–
But no, it could always be worse. Think of the window.