Cruel Beauty
Page 65

“Not enough.” She said the words like she was flicking an ant off her dress.
“My life,” I said wildly.
“Not enough.”
“Then I will serve you.” The Kindly Ones always bargained. They had to. Didn’t they?
In my arms, Lux stirred and hoarsely whispered, “No.”
I pressed a hand over his mouth. If he was frightened for me, then it had to be a bargain they would accept.
“I’ll serve you every day until the end of time,” I said. “Just like he did.”
“Do you imagine that we lack servants?” The lady knelt before me with a terrible smile. “Know this, child. There is no price you can ever pay that will suffice to release him from the darkness. He made his choice, and lief or loath he shall have it until the end of time.”
I remembered opening the door, remembered shadows burrowing into my face and hands.
“Then,” I said, and my voice was a little wobbling thing.
One is one and all alone. For nine hundred years, he suffered that for you.
“Then let me make a different bargain,” I said, more strongly. My whole body pulsed with terror, but my love was in my arms and I couldn’t let go. “For my price, I’ll stay with him in the darkness. Forever and ever.”
The lady rose. “And your wish?”
“Nothing. I love him, and I want to be with him.”
“Don’t,” said Lux, his voice stronger.
“I’m not going to start obeying you now,” I told him, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Then I looked up. “Just give me the price and nothing else. Just let me be with him and share in his punishment.”
The lady’s eyes widened. “That is a fool’s bargain,” she said. “To pay everything and ask for only helplessness in return. Do you think you will comfort him at all? There is no love in the shadows. It would destroy the purest heart and neither of you is pure. You will hate and hurt each other and become your own monsters.”
Her words hammered into me. Every one of them was absolutely true. Neither one of us had ever been pure, and therefore neither of us was strong enough to defeat the darkness. Even in this new world—so much gentler than the one I now remembered—the traitor threads of anger and selfishness still wove through my heart. I would hate and hurt him eventually, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself.
That had been Lux’s mistake, nine hundred years ago, thinking that he could bargain the Kindly Ones into making him actually kind. It was the folly of all the people who had ever bargained with them, believing that if they just found the correct price for the perfect power, they would be able to make their wishes come out right.
I knew better: there was no power I could buy or steal that would save me from my own heart.
But I could still be with him. I didn’t need any power at all, to suffer the same as him.
One of Lux’s hands had found mine, and even though he was mouthing No, his grip gave me the strength to meet the lady’s eyes and whisper, “Even so, I will keep my vow. Where he dies, I will die. And there will I be buried.”
And with a burst of song, the sparrow landed on my wrist.
A handful of kindness, it said to the Kindly Ones. The answer to your riddle.
The ground tilted beneath us, and suddenly we were in the laughing, light-drenched garden where I had met the sparrow. The Kindly Ones blazed with painful light, but I couldn’t look away.
Are you not the Lords of Bargains? said the sparrow. Keep this one, then.
It is no bargain, said the lady. It is a revolt against bargaining. It will destroy itself in the granting. It will destroy us in the granting.
Yes, said the sparrow. Keep it.
They deserve it, the lady snarled. Her face was still human, but only in the same way as a face-shaped knot on a tree trunk, a faint and meaningless resemblance. The darkness and the shadows, they both have it in their hearts and they deserve to have nothing else.
Lux raised his head from my shoulder and looked at the Kindly Ones. “We both . . . accepted that,” he said hoarsely.
Go, said the sparrow. Go. You cannot bear this much kindness.
Something rang out, both like a shriek and like infinite silence; then the Kindly Ones were gone like a ripple in water. The leaves all rustled and turned into living flames.
Do not forget, said the sparrow. The grass caught fire.
“Forget what?” I asked.
It leapt into the air and hovered, its wings whirring into a blur.
Your bargain is death to their power. If you hold on, you may find your way back again.
The air turned into liquid light. The ground rippled beneath us, then melted away, and we fell down into infinite depths, the fire falling with us in great coruscating streams that swirled and screamed through darkness.
In that darkness waited the Children of Typhon, who laughed and sang as they swirled around us. Just as before, their song left me shuddering in helpless horror. And they devoured us: they crawled under our skin and wept out our eyes, they bubbled into our lungs until we choked on the infinite, icy shadow. They hollowed me out until I was only a senseless parchment husk. But no matter how they shredded away all meaning from me, I was still circled in Lux’s arms and I was his.
The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.
We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.
But I held on to him.
And he held on to me.
I woke with the dazzle of morning sunlight in my eyes, birdsong chattering in my ears. I lay on the hard ground, stiff and cold and sore, but there was somebody beside me.
Lux.
I bolted up and then didn’t dare move. It didn’t seem possible that he was here: the prince I had dreamt about, actually real. The husband I had betrayed, actually rescued. The ghostly prisoner, actually whole. Yet here he lay, half curled on his side, his chest moving softly with each breath. I felt like he would vanish if I moved.
So I sat still and stared at him. He had the same slender, lovely face that I remembered seeing on both men. His skin was shockingly pale, but it was a human pallor, not the ghostly milk-white of Shade. His hair was black, but lanky and tangled as I had never seen Ignifex’s.