Work Text:
Your cavalier was not a nice girl. Your cavalier had never been called nice, and she could not remember the last time she had been called girl. She’d borne several titles: bodyguard, nurse, knight. Even disciple, once. Some she laid claim to. Others she did not.
Above and below all things, she was your cavalier.
You were called many things, too. Bright girl. Foolish girl. Poor, sweet girl. You smiled and endured and only she would see the snarl on your face when the door closed behind them. You gave her that like a thorned rose. She called you my lady and you would call her my dear. You called everyone dear, but there were teeth in your mouth when you said it to her.
When he finally came, he called you Duchess. He came to see the miracle.
A young man had fallen from a ladder. He laid cold and dead in the palace’s great freezer for a day and a night while you readied yourself for your work. He had been painting a fresco. It sat unfinished now; his paintbrush had left spots on the stone where it had fallen. You worked for more than an hour over the corpse until you heaved for breath. She nearly took you away from the dead boy by force when she saw blood on your teeth. But then—the boy sat up. He swung his legs down from the metal table and walked stiffly across the room to look up at your cavalier. When he smiled, it was with your sharp, private smile.
That was why he came. To see the resurrection committed not by his hand. The King Undying, to whom we all owe the debt of our lives, walked upon the Seventh House for the first time to see a man brought back from the dead, and the woman powerful enough to raise him. The man walked and spoke and sometimes laughed, though he did not paint anymore. The Necromancer Divine knew as soon as he lay his monstrous eyes upon the boy that the body was as empty then as the moment the boy’s skull struck the floor. He did not seem disappointed by this. You scoffed prettily when later she told you he seemed almost relieved. He smiled at you indulgently and complimented your exquisite work, your clever trick, and he asked if you would like to join his other disciples in their studies on the barren and sacred First. She did not think he even knew your name.
Later you would be called First. Later you would be called Lyctor. Later you would take her name and stitch it to yours and force your brothers and sisters to invoke her for ten thousand years.
She would have given you her name, if only you’d asked. She had already given you her body, and all that was worthwhile of her mind, and more of her heart than she thought was possible. She would have offered it to you, in truth—her heart, speared bruise-dark and dripping upon her rapier—if you had asked it of her. If it would have changed anything. You chided her for being grotesque. As though you disdained a bit of blood. As though you didn’t flush pink watching the bouts between your friends and companions, drunk on the perennial summer of their youth, pushing each other much further than any sparring in your Lord’s houses ever dared. Often Nigella’s wicked dagger or Pyrrha’s swift, economical sword would open red lines across your cavalier’s skin—she gave as good as she got, don’t forget—and you kissed them better with a bit of magic. You would grin up at her with her blood on your lips.
She thought you understood.
Well. You never did ask, not for anything. Except for the once. And that was later.
She remained your steadfast protector when you transferred to Canaan House. You had been permitted one retainer and honored her with your choice. You rolled your eyes at her, asked who else? She had not wanted to assume—anything. You took her hands in yours, so thin and hot, and you brought them to your lips, and said she had leave to assume whatever she liked. She didn’t know if you saw her blush. Probably you did. It seemed then you saw everything about her. She thought you understood.
It was her job, sweetheart. It had always been her job to protect your life, knowing that it might cost hers. You never thought so little of her as to believe she didn’t understand that. She hadn’t thought you did. Every morning she woke up at your feet knowing that today might be the day she was called upon. She could not say she would have done so happily—she’d seen your face when she talked like that. She knew it hurt you and she would burn anyone who hurt you, but she would have done so without regrets.
She wanted you to live. That’s all.
You were the last to arrive. Your inclusion made a full complement of disciples; two from each House, eight necromancers and their plus ones. They weren’t cavaliers yet. That came later, when one of them—had it been Cristabel? it seemed a very Cristabel notion—sought a way to serve their Lord in the absence of necromantic talent. If not their minds, then their bodies.
Your cavalier had been otherwise serving with the strength of her arm for a long time and so did not mind the idea too much. She even went so far as to offer instruction, she and Pyrrha and sometimes Titania showing the rest what could be accomplished with a sword and a little discipline. It was something to do. And besides, she knew you liked to watch.
Those were good, long days of discovery and camaraderie, of arguments and laughter and duels after supper. Of happiness. Of you.
There were no roses, save any you grew yourself, and when those first rosebushes died you did not exert yourself to preserve them. The air was often damp at Canaan House, but the wind smelled of salt, and the gardens had only the spicy, alive fragrance of herbs and vegetables. Practical things. There was no perfume here.
Days bled warmly into weeks and years through the hallways of Canaan House. She would have stayed there forever, watching you unpick the mysteries of life and death. It was a great work, you told her. It could change everything, and not just for you. If you and the others could solve this task the King Undying had put before you, you might all share in the bounty of time unending.
That was your oldest adversary, time. You had been dying in Rhodes. You were dying at Canaan House. More slowly, that was true. The Lord over the River could preserve you like a flower pressed between the pages of a book for as long as you served loyally at his side. But you had not escaped the Seventh to walk into a different kind of cage, no matter how beautiful.
You found that beauty did not matter much to you after all.
The work lit you up. Coming back from the lab smeared with ash, your delicate curls in a tangle and eyes burning like the First House sun. She would sit behind you on your too-large bed, your narrow hips between her knees, and run a comb through your hair while theory poured out of you. Your hands cut the air with all the precision of a rapier as you explained the boundaries of necromantic thought and exactly how you planned to break them to pieces.
There were days you burned too brightly and later paid the price. Not even the King Undying was permitted to see you on those days. She took this duty very seriously. He could prod and sigh and imply all he liked; she would stare into his deadlight eyes and frown until he left.
Your God wouldn’t let you die. All there was to do was endure. Sometimes your eyes were flickering coals of hatred. Sometimes you hid your head beneath the blankets and would not speak. Sometimes you snarled at her to go away. She didn’t, and you didn’t make her, though you likely could have, even then.
You could never be ugly to her. She thought perhaps you resented that.
There were more good days than bad. Or maybe you just remember the good ones better.
She sometimes had the privilege of waking up beside you. You would tease and cajole her, your hot fingers running over her arms, her back, her shoulders until they relaxed under your palms, the propriety all run out of her. She would almost smile. Her cot would lie cold that night. You could have asked for anything you wanted, but you preferred your little game, to see how much you could push before your stubborn cavalier yielded. It was a question of when, not if, and you both knew it.
If she was honest with herself, you didn’t have to try very hard.
You would bend into the curve of her body like a seeking flower, blankets drawn up against the threat of a chill until you ran with sweat from the close heat, skin to skin. Would anyone have called you saint if they had seen you so? Damp curls pasted to the side of your face. The crease of a pillow imprinted on your flushed cheek. How you slept so lightly that if she moved even a little you would reach for her like a child and curl your fingers hungrily into her shirt.
Perhaps they wouldn’t have. She—yes, yes, you know—she didn’t live to see your ascension, but she didn’t have to. She knew it then.
She thought you were beautiful. You knew that, didn’t you? She thought you were the brightest, strangest, most beautiful person she had ever met.
She should have known; even on the Seventh, with its long humid days, the sun always set eventually. Too much quiet can lull even the wariest dog to sleep. It turned out she had believed you, when you said you’d have forever.
Something changed. She didn’t understand enough of the theory to know exactly what, and the necromancers were never exactly forthcoming. Less so now, shushing each other whenever she passed a knot of them in a hallway, watching her like she was a wraith that had escaped its blood ward. Still, she didn’t need to understand to see their fevered eyes, to see the new lines around your mouth. But even you wouldn’t say what was wrong.
The communal dinners your God insisted on became a venue for torturous silence and little else. She watched your companions’ faces. Mercymorn was a wound spring, snapping for someone to please pass the carrots, and Augustine would hand them over without a word, his eyes focused somewhere far away from the table. Cassiopeia would pull out a scrap of flimsy and scribble furiously for several minutes, not caring if she stained the corners with grease. Anastasia barely ate, except at Samael’s prompting. She was too busy watching the Necrolord Prime. His uncanny bodyguard sat beside him, not eating, watching them in turn. Sometimes your cavalier would meet her yellow hawk’s eyes and feel a strange kinship.
Cristabel and Alfred were the only ones who seemed not to notice. They would whisper to each other all the way through dessert and then leave together, sometimes even laughing into the sepulchral silence they left behind.
They were plotting something in tandem to whatever was brewing among the necromancers. This did not alarm your cavalier much. Cristabel and Alfred were always plotting something. Whatever it was, she heard their new byword all over Canaan House. “One flesh, one end,” they would declare, like she ought to know what it meant.
She thought it was funny, in a crass way. She breathed it into your sweat-slick neck one evening, thinking it would make you laugh.
You didn’t laugh.
You went rigid beneath her. You demanded to know where she’d heard those words, what she meant by them. She didn’t understand. You pushed at her shoulder and she rolled away from you. You didn’t see her flush. Didn’t see the careful way she made sure none of her body touched any part of yours. You were too busy struggling up out of the sheets and storming across the room. She felt that empty space as a rebuke and could not know you made it from your own guilt.
She slept in her cot. You slept in your lab. Day by day, you faded like a flower kept from the sun. She worried, as she was prone to do, and left food where you would find it, even if she couldn’t make you eat. It wasn’t necessary, in any case, not in that place. But she worried.
She had presumed too much. But still, she was yours, in every way it was possible to be yours (so she thought at the time) and whatever you needed, she would give. No more. No less. She thought you understood.
It was the middle of the night when you burst into your shared rooms. The sky was the deep ink blue it sometimes was on the First in the hours preceding true morning. You were a silvered silhouette as you crossed the distance between door and bed and threw yourself into your cavalier’s arms.
She held you without thinking, barely awake. There was no time to take any pleasure from your touch. You were crying. You were sobbing convulsively into her shoulder, lungs whistling in the way that heralded an attack if you’d had enough breath in your body to cough.
Alfred and Cristabel, you conveyed with great difficulty, were dead. They had killed themselves. She couldn’t think of anything to say to this. She didn’t know any of them had been allowed to die.
Eventually you calmed enough to speak clearly, and what you told her next at first made no sense. She didn’t know much about the theory you had been struggling all this time to perfect, save its importance. Save that it might finally, after everything, make you live. After some time, she grasped enough. Alfred and Cristabel were dead, and the theory, your great work, had made something useful of their deaths, and now Mercy and Augustine would live forever.
You started to cry again, then, while this understanding filled her like cool water. She held you until you fell asleep. No more and no less.
The days that followed were strung tight as piano wire, waiting for the hammer to fall. She saw Pyrrha once more, on a balcony at sunset. She raised her cigarette to your cavalier in a salute. The next day she was gone.
Slowly, quietly, Canaan House became a graveyard for the second time.
One morning, her sword was missing. So were you. She tried not to be insulted, that you thought she would do it in secret, as though she were ashamed.
She found you in the garden. It was overgrown; the tending of it had fallen to the wayside in those last frantic months of work, but it was beautiful. It smelled green and alive. You were sitting on the edge of one of your reclining chairs, her blade across your knees, staring out at the waves. You didn’t stir when she approached, or when she dropped to her knees beside you. You only moved when she tried to take your hand, and only to clutch the grip of the rapier tighter.
“It isn’t right,” you said. You didn’t look at her.
She said the others had already gone, most of the them. She said it must be right.
“It can’t be,” you rasped. “It’s wrong. He wouldn’t ask this of us.”
She kept her own counsel on that. She wasn’t doing this for him.
Your cavalier laid her rough palm against your cheek and turned your face to hers. Your eyes were red-rimmed and wet. The sun edged your curls in gold. You were lovely. She brushed a tear aside with her thumb. This was what she wanted, she told you. That this is what she had to give and she was giving it freely. Her eyes were clear and blue as the summer sky.
That’s what you remember most. How blue her eyes were. How they seemed to glow with purpose. How they scoured you with your unworthiness.
But she was not your God, to set you tasks that you might succeed or fail. To watch your progress with all the hunger of a singularity, a flat black oil slick in his unassuming face. You didn’t have to be worthy. She wanted you to live.
She wrapped her other hand over yours, around the hilt of her sword. You shook your head. You closed your eyes.
“Please,” you asked at last, as she laid the point against her breast. She almost laughed at that. Of course you would ask for the one thing she wasn’t prepared to give.
You were shaking. But you carefully repositioned the sword, moving it an inch lower, a whisper to the left. You were a flesh magician, after all. With your precision and her strength, you sunk the blade into her heart as one.
Her breath escaped as a long sigh. She felt your arms around her. It hurt, of course it hurt, but she didn’t want you to see that. Against the pain, she looked up at you. She pressed her mouth to yours. Bruise-dark and dripping. There was blood on her teeth.
“No, no, Loveday, no, please” you begged against her lips.
Hand in your hand. Blood in your mouth. The slow darkness of an ending, a curtain falling. One flash of light so bright it burned, and it was done.
She loved you. She—loves you. She misses you.
She thought you understood. She wanted you to live.