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Her daemon is at the edges of the estate. Marisa can tell, can almost smell the crisp autumn breeze rather than brandy and wool. At farther than fifteen meters, every step begins to feel like a recently healed wound; at twenty a fresh one; at thirty, now, a cut still being inflicted, neverending, the act of it extended past any natural sort of pain.
She’s sitting in the center of the room on a brocade chair she has always loathed. Still, she arranged to match it, wearing the blue silk dress Asriel likes her best in. He’d never say so, of course. Marisa is certain that in fact he isn’t even aware. But the ever-hungry gleam in his eyes intensifies every time he catches sight of her in it, though that isn’t half of why he’s looking at her like that now.
To catch Lord Asriel’s interest is akin to being set aflame, the way paper goes up in smoke under a magnifying glass in the sun. Marisa felt it on the evening they met, on the first occasion in her memory that her plans had ever gone so terribly awry. To fall in love is frivolous; to fall in love is to be as everyone has ever expected her to be.
But Asriel’s eyes are unyielding. In the face of them that night, she could do nothing else. His roaring, unkempt laugh, his hand brushing her arm just along the edges of propriety, his hot mouth on her neck in the hallway behind the kitchens—all of those things were secondary considerations. It’s his gaze that pinned her down, that pierced her through the heart. Another cut neverending.
And so she tells him everything, always, even when she doesn’t mean to. While they spoke over wine one night of his research, of elementary particles, of souls, she couldn’t help but tell him about what she can do. She couldn’t help but show him, her monkey slipping out of the drawing room and down the hallway, down, down, so far that one hand curled to her chest and the other reached out, yearning, all without her permission.
And he’d stared at her, the first time she’d ever seen him truly shocked. He’d grinned his lion’s grin, and if Marisa ever could have turned her back, that was the moment it was too late. There is always, she is learning, further and further to fall.
She asked that he help her practice. And he’d agreed with more the air of an explorer than of a lover, and yet that night his hands hardly left her.
In the brocade chair, Marisa crosses her legs. She takes in a breath and holds it, willing it to fill the chasm being levered open inside of her, second by passing second. Asriel stands before the door, Stelmaria curled at his feet, licking her paw and fixing Marisa with a heavy golden gaze. “You’re remarkably composed,” he says. “How far, now?”
“The gates,” Marisa says. She tastes the iron of them on her tongue. “Around back.” It’s dark out, and cold, the night half gone so that they won’t be disturbed. Marisa is freezing from the open breezy sky, and she’s sweating, from the heat of the fire in this room.
Stelmaria sits up a little at that, as though she’s surprised, her tail switching rapidly from side to side. Imagining, perhaps, traveling that distance from Asriel. Marisa can’t look at her too long without being struck by an awful and dizzying sense of jealousy, anger overtaking her so hot and sudden that she feels she might go blind with it. He dares—they dare—that they should be together while Marisa is ripped apart—
Past the edge of the estate now—he must have climbed over the gate—past it by five meters at least. Marisa stumbles to her feet before realizing that she’s done so, no real direction in mind except towards, closer, now, she can’t stand it.
Asriel catches her about the shoulders. “Marisa.” His voice is always so deep. It washes over her pleasantly, the tide smoothing over sand, but for once she doesn’t feel calmed in its wake.
“It hurts,” she tells him, swaying in his grip. She grins at him, all teeth, wondering if she looks as he does when he smiles. “You can’t even begin to imagine how much it hurts.” There is a pleasure in that. Asriel’s eyes had gone bright with interest when she’d proposed this little experiment of theirs. He’d been quite eager to help. But never once did he suggest that he and Stelmaria try it. Lord Asriel goes on his great expeditions to the North, risks death and worse than death, but this he will not attempt. In this, Marisa is stronger than him. In this she always will be.
His hand leaves her shoulder, grazes her cheek. Not gentle, not ever, but present enough to keep her here, in this room where she doesn’t belong. “What does it feel like?” he asks. “Precisely, this time.”
“Horrible,” she says, watching his eyes on her, feeling the press of his palm against her back. Another meter. One more. She lurches forward again, her hands finding his shoulder blades as he wraps his arm around her. “Like being split in half. Like a broken leg that never sets, like it’s going to bleed forever—like everything is bleeding, all of me—let me go, Asriel—”
“No,” he tells her, and kisses her so deeply and so devouringly that for a moment it obscures every other thought and hurt. But only for a moment.
She buries her hands in his hair and digs her nails in, punishingly. He hisses when she bites him, but stands utterly steady, a mountain weathering a wave.
Another step away, and then another. Marisa gasps. She closes her eyes and feels folded down to her purest state, two bodies in orbit—or maybe just one, maybe she’s only herself—an elementary particle contains, after all, only itself—
“Look at me,” commands Asriel, and at his fingers on her chin Marisa obeys. She’s scratched him until he bleeds. She hates him more than she has ever loved him, and she loves him past all reason. He’s tearing her apart, so much more sharply than she has ever been able to do to herself. He hasn’t ever done anything else.
She’s so glad she asked for his help; they’d never be able to go this far without it. She hates that she needs him for this, for anything, that he looked at her once with his piercing gaze and altered the course of her life. She wants to kill him for doing this to her.
His hand on her cheek again, and then stroking her hair. She doesn’t know when she started crying. Marisa never cries. To let Asriel, of all people, see her cry is intolerable. She hits him flat on the chest with both palms, and then with her fists, hard enough that he takes a single measured step back. Stelmaria rises from her crouch, letting out a heavy breath through her nose. Marisa steps forward and does it again. “You’re killing me,” she spits. “That’s what it feels like.”
“Only as much as you asked,” he says, unbothered, his eyes moving back and forth across her face as though reading a particularly engrossing page. “You’re so beautiful right now, Marisa. Incandescent.” He blinks, as though he’s come across an unexpected passage. “I truly do love you, do you know?”
She slaps him. The sting in her palm feels like nothing. Every other part of her aches so acutely that she thinks she could drive a knife into her palm and feel nothing. Asriel throws his head back and laughs, and then he kisses her again, welcoming her teeth. She wraps her arms around his neck and tries to let it fill the awful growing space inside her. He makes her feel so terribly much at all the most inconvenient times. But it still isn’t enough.
Another step. She really might be dying, here in Asriel’s arms, soul stretching taut until she snaps.
Stelmaria’s chin brushes against her knee over the dress, the almost-there contact burning white-hot. Marisa starts, pulling back from Asriel’s embrace. They stare at each other, both utterly caught. Stelmaria hums. Her tail bobs, and then it settles along the bone of Marisa’s ankle, wrapping half around it.
For a moment no one breathes. Marisa has not touched Stelmaria. She has touched no daemon but her own; certainly not Edward’s. Asriel’s hold on her goes loose, something dazed about his expression. She’s never seen him so wrong-footed. Stelmaria nudges her wet nose against Marisa’s calf. Already unsteady, she falls all at once, Asriel nearly going down after her.
He manages to keep his footing just barely. Stelmaria leaps over the tangle of Marisa’s legs to put one heavy paw on her sternum, pressing her down.
The pressure to brace against helps. Marisa reaches up. Her hand trembles until the moment she buries it in the fur at the base of Stelmaria’s neck. It feels like dipping a frostbitten limb into hot bathwater. It feels for just a moment like being whole, in the worst possible way.
“Marisa,” Asriel says, choked and sounding very far away. He’s fallen to his knees.
Stelmaria, rumbling in her throat, settles down atop Marisa’s chest, tail sweeping in lazy arcs, chin resting on her collarbone.
Forty meters, holding steady. It doesn’t hurt any less, but the endless chasm of it has receded. She can make the pain bearable the way she does any other pain: by gritting her teeth and thinking of the outcome, of what will make it worth it. Of secrets unburied, of power unparalleled, of Asriel’s hungry eyes on her, as devouring as his kiss.
They stay like that until Marisa’s heartbeat slows, until she finally stops sobbing. Asriel’s hand has joined her on Stelmaria’s neck, gripping the both of them tight.
Marisa curls the fingers of her other hand, stretched out on the carpet, beckoning at nothing. And forty meters becomes thirty, fifteen, five. The door clatters open and her monkey is cradled in her free arm, all her fingers full of fur. She pulls him in tight to her chest, the both of them clinging. Curling up around each other as they did when Marisa was a child, and had yet to banish her nightmares.
Asriel’s hand wavers above them both for just a moment. He meets her gaze. She tugs her monkey closer, burying her face in his fur. He chitters in her ear, shivering despite the fire. Asriel doesn’t touch him. Marisa doesn’t know what she would do if he tried to just now. Instead he settles down behind her, an arm over her waist, Stelmaria sprawled contentedly across both of them.
“You are never more beautiful than when you’re like that,” he says against the back of her neck, the same wondering tone he might give any of the myriad phenomena he studies, the endless engrossing mysteries of the universe.
“Like what?” Marisa does not open her eyes as he draws her hair back, presses a solemn kiss to her nape.
“Defiant,” Asriel says. “Against the very truth of the world itself.”
They’ll have to move before morning, when the servants will arrive, as ready to gossip as ever. But Asriel will wake her before then. She dozes, the pieces of herself slowly coming back together, just a touch more elastic than before. Someday she will be able to separate from herself without a thought. Someday it will be worth it.
Like any muscle stretched too far, the ache lingers for days. It never does quite go away, in weeks or months or years. She doesn’t tell Asriel that part.