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She had dressed for him on the climb up. Not in any obvious way, since the obvious had stopped working years ago, but in the way one prepares a knife: the violet half-cloak he had complimented twice, the boots that put her almost at his shoulder when he rose, the line of kohl she could draw without a mirror. By the time she reached the upper chambers of Snake Mountain, her lipstick was the color of a bruise that had been thinking about itself for several days.
She paused at the threshold to settle her breathing. Beyond the doors, she could hear the small sounds of him alone: the clink of a goblet set down on stone, the creak of the throne as it accepted his weight, the low rasp that passed for his version of patience. She listened until she had the rhythm of it, then pushed the doors open.
He was on the throne, as he always was at this hour. Bones picked clean and lacquered to a hard shine, threaded together with wire that glittered when the braziers shifted. Bones from things she had stopped asking about. He had styled himself into the chair so completely that, from the right angle, one could not tell where the throne ended and the master of it began.
She crossed the chamber and went down on one knee at the base of the dais.
"Well?" His voice was the dry rasp of a thing pleased with its own weight.
"The garrison at Avion has been pacified." She kept her chin lifted. "The Sword was not there."
A pause. The skull tilted by a degree.
"Define pacified."
"Forty-six dead. Eleven captured. The commander broke before sundown and gave us three names we did not previously have."
"And the Sword."
"Was not there, my lord."
She watched the bones of the throne resettle as he shifted his weight. She did not embellish. He had taught her, over the years, the difference between failure presented and failure dressed.
The silence after a report was the silence she had learned to read like weather. She knew which silences preceded a backhand of magic, which preceded a humiliation worked through a third party, which preceded the kind of cruelty he composed and delivered as if it were a sonnet. She had stood through all of them. She had, by her own private accounting, come to require them.
This silence was none of those.
He sighed.
The sound was so small that she almost did not catch it. It was not the theatrical exhale he used to mark displeasure for an audience. It was a tired thing. It belonged to a body that had been awake for a long time.
She lifted her eyes.
"Get up, Evil-Lyn."
She rose. Her knees ached in a way that pleased her, because the ache was from him, even if only obliquely. She let the half-cloak fall from her shoulder by half an inch.
"My lord," she began, and she had rehearsed this part on the spiral stair, "I am at your disposal for whatever correction you deem fitting. I failed to verify the intelligence. I should have insisted on a second source before committing the strike. I will accept."
She let the sentence trail off because the trailing was the invitation.
The skull regarded her. She had stood under that regard a thousand times. She had felt his magic crawl up the back of her neck like a small predator getting comfortable. She had felt nothing, sometimes, which was worse, because nothing meant he was thinking about something else. Tonight she felt something she could not put a finger on, and the not-knowing made her bolder than she should have been.
She climbed the first step of the dais.
"Whatever you would have of me," she said, lower.
She did not say please. She had never said please. The omission was, in their long grammar together, its own word.
He did not move.
She climbed the second step. She was close enough now that she could smell the dry incense he burned when he was alone, the one whose name she had not learned because she had never asked and he had never offered. He smelled of stone heated by the sun and then forgotten by it. He smelled of a place she wanted to live.
"Stop."
She stopped.
The word had been quiet. That was the thing she could not parse. He had told her to stop a hundred times before, and every previous time it had been a command shaped like a leash, the leash being itself an intimacy. This time it had been only a word.
"My lord."
"Sit."
She blinked. "Sit."
"On the step. Sit."
She sat. The stone was cold through the fabric. She arranged the half-cloak around her knees with the small, automatic care of someone who had learned that grace was a kind of armor. She kept her face turned up to him.
He looked, for a long moment, at the brazier on his left.
"Do you know," he said, and the rasp had thinned, "what I dislike most about this room."
"Tell me."
"The mirrors."
She glanced around. There were no mirrors. There had not been mirrors in Snake Mountain for as long as she had lived in it. He hated his own reflection and had ordered them broken in his first month of conquest. Some of the breakage had been ceremonial. Some had been simply broken.
"There are none, my lord."
"Yes." He shifted again. The bones of the throne complained. "And yet."
She waited.
"Every face that comes through that door," he said, "is a mirror. Every man I have promoted reflects me back. Every woman I have spared reflects me back. The wizards reflect me back smaller. The captains reflect me back louder. The boy I made my herald reflects me back as younger, stupider, and full of teeth. I sit here, and I am surrounded by myself, and I cannot find anywhere in the room a thing that is not also me."
She did not answer. She could feel the conversation tilting toward something whose floor she could not see.
"I broke the mirrors," he went on, "and the world replaced them with people."
"My lord," she said carefully, "I am not your mirror."
"No." He turned the skull toward her. "You are worse. You are the mirror that has been studying me for years, in order to refine its angle."
She felt the words land. She did not let her face change. She had practiced the not-changing of her face the way other people practiced the harp.
"That is not fair," she said.
"It is precisely fair. It is the only fair thing I have said all month." He lifted a gauntleted hand and turned it, watching the firelight in the metal. "You came in tonight dressed for a blow. You knelt before I asked. You climbed two steps before I had even looked at you. You offered me a body I have not asked for, in a posture I have not requested, because at some point in our long acquaintance you decided that this was the shape my desire ought to take, and you have been refining it ever since. You have not asked me, in twelve years, what I actually want. You have only refined."
"Then tell me what you want." She heard the edge in her own voice and could not bring herself to dull it. "If I am only a mirror, then turn me. Tell me what to be, and I will be it."
He laughed. It was the only ugly thing he had done all evening.
"That," he said, "is the answer of a mirror."
She felt, distantly, the first crack open behind her sternum. She did not let it show on her face. She lifted her chin half an inch, which was what she did when she could not afford to lower it.
"What would you have me say?"
"I would have you ask me," he said, "what I am afraid of. And then disagree with the answer."
"I do not know what you are afraid of."
"No."
"Tell me."
"And there it is again," he said softly. "The mirror, turning to catch the light."
She stood. She did not mean to stand. The standing happened the way a glass falls from a hand that has forgotten it.
He did not stop her.
"My lord," she said. Her voice was level. She was proud of it. "I have served you for twelve years. I have killed for you. I have lied for you to people I admired. I have walked into rooms I knew I would not walk out of, walked out of them, then walked back into this one and reported. I have been struck by you and worse than struck. If that is the conduct of a mirror, then I am sorry that you have not had better company. But I have been the best company you have had, and you know it, or you would not have spent the last quarter of an hour telling me what I am not."
The skull was still.
She kept her hands at her sides because she did not trust them.
"You asked me," she said, "to disagree. I disagree. I am not your mirror. I am a woman who decided, at twenty-two, that the cleverest thing in the room was you, and that proximity to it was worth a great deal of pain. I made that bargain knowingly. I have honored it. If the bargain has gone sour for you, say so, and release me. If it has not, then stop punishing me for keeping my end of it."
She finished. The chamber rang with the absence of her voice. She had not meant to say half of it. The other half had been waiting, for a very long time, to be said.
He looked at her.
For a moment, she thought he might laugh again. She had braced for it. She would have walked out under it; she had walked out under worse.
Instead, he said, "Sit back down, Evil-Lyn."
"My lord."
"Please."
She sat.
It was the first time, in twelve years, that she had heard him use the word.
He did not speak for a while. The braziers ate their small meals. Somewhere far below in the mountain, a door closed, and a voice gave a low order, and the door opened again. The mountain breathed around them, as it always did, like a thing that had not quite finished waking up.
"You are not a mirror," he said finally. "I retract it. You are something else, and I am not equal to the work of naming it tonight. Forgive me. I am tired."
She had not heard him use the word forgive either. She filed both away.
"You have not slept," she said, and was surprised to hear concern in her own voice. She had not given herself permission to be concerned.
"No."
"You should."
"I should not."
She let that one go.
After a long silence, he said, "I cannot give you what you came here for."
"I know."
"I have not been able to give it to anyone."
"I know."
"It is not a withholding," he said. "It is an absence. There is nothing to withhold."
She nodded. She did not trust her face. She turned it toward the brazier so that the light would do some of the work for her.
"Then what," she said, "do I do with what I brought."
He considered her. The skull was, somehow, less terrible from this angle. She could see how the firelight pooled in the orbital ridge and slid off again. She could see that he had been a man, once. She had always known it, theoretically. She had not, before tonight, looked at it.
"Bring it less often," he said. "Or bring something else. I do not know."
"That is not an answer."
"No. It is the closest thing I have."
She sat with that for a long time. The cold of the step had worked its way up into her hips. She thought, with a private and bitter clarity, that she had spent twelve years training herself to take a kind of pain that he had never actually wished to inflict, and that he had been, in his own way, suffering the giving of it. She thought that perhaps the worst thing about loneliness was that it taught you to make other people lonely, and to call the teaching love.
"My lord."
"Yes."
"If I came back tomorrow with something else. Not this. A real disagreement. A quarrel about strategy. A book I have read that I think you have misread. Would you hear it?"
He was quiet.
"I would try," he said.
"Try is not yes."
"No. It is not." A pause. "It is the closest thing I have, tonight, to yes."
She stood. She drew the half-cloak back up onto her shoulder, neatly, because neat was what she had instead of brave. She inclined her head, not in the deep dip he had used to require, but in the half-bow one gave to a peer one was about to leave the room of.
"Sleep, my lord."
"Evil-Lyn."
She paused at the doors.
"The strike at Avion." His voice had again gone into its more familiar register. The rasp was back. The performance was gently resuming. "You will brief me on it tomorrow. With the second source, we both should have had. I will not be kind about it."
"I do not require you to be kind about it."
"I know," he said. "That is why I will not be."
She let herself smile, just once, in the half-second before she turned. He would not see it. The smile was for her.
She walked the spiral stair back down to her own chambers. She did not weep. She had, somewhere along the climb up, decided that she would not weep tonight, and the decision held. She removed the kohl with the small, automatic care of someone who had learned that grace was a kind of armor, and she sat at her vanity, in the dark, for a long time.
She thought about the word forgive, and the word please, and the way he had said try.
She thought about being twenty-two and choosing.
She thought about choosing again.
In the upper chamber, alone on his throne of bones, Skeletor sat with his head tilted against the lacquered femur of something that had once flown. The braziers worked at their small task. He did not sleep. He had not, in fact, been lying about that. He watched the doors she had walked out of for a long time, as if expecting them to open again, and then for a long time after that, with no expectation at all.
He had wanted, at the very last, to call her back. He had not done it. He had told himself, on the long count between her exit and the resettling of the room, that it was because she would have come, and that her coming would have proved his point, and that proving it would have cost her something he had no right to ask for.
The truer reason, which he did not allow himself, was that he had been afraid that she would not.