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The only way down into the depths of the tomb was via the rooms in which Samot resided, and so it was there that Charter Castille stood. She watched Samot with a dispassionate air, as she often did—an easy thing for a marble statue to achieve. She was dressed differently today than she had been of late, though. Surprising. To herself, not least.
“A hat,” Samot said, returning the favour. “Interesting. Does that work for you?”
“No,” Castille said. The movement of her mouth was very natural—this fact in itself adding to the strangeness of her. How much less human than Samot she seemed, when you considered these parts and not the entire entity they added up to. “I’m too obviously myself for a hat to help. But I used to think it did.”
A significant pause.
“My lord,” she added. A sly note creeping in there, slipping past her coolness and her quiet sorrow.
He raised an eyebrow. A god’s face need not, presumably, show tiredness. His did, all the same.
“You started this,” Castille said, into his silence. Another improbably long pause. “This conversation.”
“I suppose I did,” Samot said—as though the fact truly hadn’t occurred to him. Independently, both of their gazes fell upon a velvet-lined display cabinet, where that mask lay—that mask, the familiar one—Samot’s likeness, last worn by the boy who now more closely resembled—who now was—
Independently, they both averted their eyes—met with a jolt in the middle.
“I tire of it, regardless,” Samot said. “The door is there. Go down to him, or don’t. I’m far too busy to—“
He fell silent.
Castille watched him until he gestured sharp dismissal, and then she walked with deliberate steps to the door.
She opened it.
Descended. A long hard way down into a place that didn’t want to be visited.
This forge bore a certain resemblance to that other—was made, in parts, from the same stuff. But only in parts. It carried in its fire and shadow some hint of another heat—a different dark pooling in it, not yet present but reaching. It crawled unpleasantly across the skin that Castille didn’t truly have—reached back into a remembered place in which she could feel and scratched at her there.
Samothes’ head was bowed, his back turned to her. No sound of hammer-strikes, no movement.
Her footsteps echoed—
Maelgwyn flinched—yes, Maelgwyn—Castille had seen that flinch before. Only once.
“Charter,” he said, with Samothes’ voice—nearly with Samothes’ voice—it lacked the presence, the weight.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it’s me.”
He laughed. His shoulders hunched.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “I’m not him.”
Castille stood again in silence, hands neatly clasped in front of her.
“I’m not,” he insisted, reading the protest in her although he didn’t see her.
She took a step closer, and another—slow steps, a pause between each.
On the anvil Maelgwyn’s hands were clenched with the convulsive tightness of pain. A body under the knife—where was it, that sword? Not visible in the room. It pulled at him unseen.
He looked up at her only when she placed her cold hand on his shoulder—a sidelong look—taking in her face—a new vein of black from eye to jaw. The hat—
His eyes widened. “Castille.”
He looked boyish still, a parody, a poor copy. But there were such deep circles around his eyes, lines—pain, pain again, written into every angle of him.
“No,” she said. “You were right the first time. But I wanted—“
She shrugged.
He straightened. Shoulders squared and chin raised. Castille didn’t release him. He seemed himself sculpted, his body held such tension. Together they formed some memorial statue—
We will not be remembered, Castille thought—
We will not be remembered, Maelgwyn thought—
Truly Castille. Some fragment of her. Truly Maelgwyn. Some splinter of him.
“Sit with me, then,” Samothes said, with a mouth that still held traces of Maelgwyn’s in the curve of the lips.
No chairs simply appeared for them. Instead, they walked together through the forge to a little table pressed up against a wall. One chair.
Samothes sat on the corner of the table, with Maelgwyn’s proud posture.
Castille sat. Looked up at him.
“Would you like an orange?”
He studied her seriously—a moment of blank confusion—a moment of recognition—
His face fell.
Then he started to laugh.
“Please.”
She produced one from a pocket of the dress she wore—the old dress, the one that had attended countless brunches, waiting for him or actually seeing him, when he was—himself. No, no, he was himself now. When he was another person, and so was she.
Her hands were methodical in dismantling the orange for him.
“You told me once,” Samothes said—Maelgwyn said—
“That regret is easier to manage than you might think,” Castille finished. She offered him a slice of the orange, marble fingers grasping it with some delicacy. His hand brushed against hers as he took it—of course, she didn’t feel it. But he frowned, fleeting.
“Yes.”
“It is,” she said. “What do you regret, Samothes?”
“Dying.”
A smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “That’s much easier to manage than you might think too.”
He closed his eyes. That golden child, hair now turned dark. His sun-kissed face still luminous even here in the dark—even with those shadows around his eyes.
“How did it feel when Maelgwyn killed you?” he asked.
“When you killed me.”
He nodded—no protest, this time.
She considered.
“Exciting,” she said. “I was excited.”
“No,” he said. Not disbelief, only a flat refusal in his tone.
“It was a good duel.”
“The moment, though—”
“It was quick.” She shrugged. “You’re very good at killing people. I was excited. And then I was Castille. It hurt on the way, I guess. But not for long.”
He studied her—nodded a puzzled acceptance.
“A transformation.”
“I didn’t lose much,” she said. Smiled, more easily now. “I just didn’t need all of it for a while. Who knows who you’ll be in—”
“I’m not mortal, Castille—”
“Charter,” she said. She said it with a certain gentleness that had been absent from her since this forge had been another one, had been in the heart of a volcano, and she had ripped herself apart to hurt Sige, and he’d barely even felt it—
Was startled to hear that tone herself.
Samothes softened for a moment at hearing it. A boyish relief.
“Castille too,” Maelgwyn said. “That was always a part of the name.”
Straightened into Samothes.
A little less Maelgwyn to the shape of his mouth.
A work in progress.
“I guess so,” Castille said.
“What do you regret, Charter Castille?” he asked.
Silence again. She looked down at her hands.
“Very little that’s worth changing,” she said. “It’s the way it is.”
“Tell me.”
Oh, there was a hint of real command to that.
Her eyes flicked up to his.
“I could have kissed Maelgwyn,” she said. “And felt it. I don’t really remember why it mattered so much now. I just wish—”
She gestured, an encompassing sweep of the hand which indicated every complexity of relationship involved in making this place where they sat now. Everything transmuted. Everything and everyone made strange.
“Oh,” Samothes said—Maelgwyn said.
The flicker-shift of him, the last thing that his will could still adjust in this tightly configured world, lightened his hair for a moment.
He bent.
A press of lips to her forehead.
By the time he stood he was definitely Samothes again, and there was still less of Maelgwyn in him than the shift before.
Samot, bent over his desk, didn’t look at her when she emerged from the door to the forge—looked instead past her, stepping over to close the door with a bang, books shivering on their shelves beside it. But Aubrey, in the middle of unrolling plans on his desk, did—wide-eyed and fierce. an intense emotion in her gaze that Castille realised, puzzled, she didn’t quite understand.
“You,” Aubrey said—snapped her mouth shut again as Samot turned. Looked to him and back to Castille. “You’re okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Castille asked, and Aubrey blinked—had forgotten, for a second or two, how distant Castille had grown.
Aubrey shrugged, eyes flicking to the location of the door, over which Samot and drawn a concealing bookcase.
It was Samot, still not looking at Castille but visible to her in profile, looking out of a window, whose face was truly stricken—a pallor to him, Aubrey saw—a tightness to the thin blade of his mouth, Castille noted.
And perhaps it had been for him the question was meant—or for both of them—
“Give me a minute,” Aubrey said, and shoved her hand against the small of Castille’s back, and pushed her to the outer door.
“I’ll let you in next time,” she said. “Come on, Castille, I know you’re all—“ a complicated wiggle of her hand. “But he’s not—he’s trying to be OK.”
“He’s a god,” Castille said.
Aubrey stared at her. “OK. Cool. Is Maelgwyn all good because he’s a god? Was Samothes? Samot’s a god. And he’s kind of a shit, honestly, but that’s fine. And I drink with him sometimes ‘cause otherwise he’d just be drinking alone.”
“I brought oranges for—Samothes.”
“Huh.”
“It was pointless, I think,” Castille said. “He’s a god. He isn’t—”
Aubrey looked her up and down—the dress, the hat.
“Uhhuh,” she said. Glanced over her shoulder, towards the closed door that led to Samot’s workroom—towards the sound of some small everyday expression of frustration or anger or grief. “Look, I have to get back. But, uh—yeah. I’ll let you in. Next time.”
She scurried away.
Castille considered her retreating form, and considered the door, and then she stood herself neatly against the wall beside it and thought about being a statue for a while. Just a cool unfeeling thing—not only disconnected but unaware of what connection could feel like.