Chapter Twenty-Nine The Lady Is Long Dead

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Lady Is Long Dead

The night after Lady Rahela's death, Emer lay down upon her narrow bed and planned who she would kill. She stared at the dark with her eyes wide open, tearless as stone.

In the years to follow, she never wept.

Time of Iron , ANONYMOUS

T he Ladies Lia and Rahela dragged Emer back to Rahela's bedroom between them. They laid Emer out on Rahela's silken sheets the way Rahela had laid out Key. Now Key was dead, so Emer got the bed. Lia's basket of liniments and medicines were beside them. Lia applied ointment to Emer's back with her own fair hands, softer than any silk in the palace. The stepsisters rolled out bandages for her wounds. They were such charitable ladies, and so kind.

It was too like the night Lia had smoothed her palms up Emer's back as Emer hovered above her. It was nothing like that night at all.

Finally, Emer couldn't stand it. She laid both hands flat on the absurdly, uncomfortably soft mattress, shoved herself upright despite the screaming flare of pain and snarled, "Get out. I don't need your pity."

Lia was like the mattress, a luxury not meant for Emer, and Emer didn't want to be one of the peasants Lia visited on her errands of grace and mercy. Oh thank you, my lady , they would say when she came to their humble huts with her basket, how can we ever repay you?

If you had nothing, you could never pay anyone. That was what made charity so bitter.

Lia knelt beside the bed, radiant hair spilling loose over her shoulders, clearly shocked by Emer's ingratitude. She bit her pink lower lip, glancing at Rahela. It made Emer want to laugh. Lia looking to her big sister for help, as though a drop of kindness could blot out years of cruelty. What a lovely, tragic fool.

Naturally, Rahela let Lia down. She sat at her dressing table, staring at her own reflection. She didn't even seem to notice when Lia rose, shaking her head, and left the wicked women to their own devices. Emer watched her go, saving the memory of her limned in the doorway to keep, a last golden moment to visualize against her closed eyelids. She wasn't sure how much time passed while she fought waves of pain as though drowning in a strange sea. When Emer surfaced, the sky through the stained-glass window had changed colour. Rahela was still gazing dully into her mirror.

As Emer grasped a bedpost, the memory of being shackled and whipped shuddered through her. She gritted her teeth and pulled herself to her feet. Then she walked over to the dressing table, and set herself to brushing her lady's midnight hair.

Rahela lifted a hand in a gesture that folded up like a silk handkerchief. "Stop. You're still hurt."

"How could that be?" Emer asked evenly. "I'm not a person. I'm not allowed to suffer. My life was spared so I could do my lady's hair."

Rahela's hands clenched on the edge of the dressing table, as though holding the edge of an ice cliff. "That was a lie I told the king!"

Emer's hand clenched on the dainty brush. She wished it was an axe.

"So your story is, trust me, I was lying to someone else ? As if I could ever believe you again. Before you ever told the future, you told me what you really thought of me. Even though I grew up with you. Even though I betrayed Lia for you. I was nothing to you, but you were a sister to me. I loved you, Rahela."

Her lady wrenched away from the dressing table, lunging at Emer as though she were a striking snake.

" Don't call me Rahela," she snapped. "Rahela's dead!"

The silver brush tumbled from Emer's hand onto the red mosaics.

Rahela pressed bloody hands to her tear-filled eyes. Tears and blood mingled, making Key's blood wet and fresh again. When her teardrops fell they left tiny crimson marks on the white silk wrap she had thrown over her ruined gown. From years of experience washing her lady's clothes, Emer knew the bloodstains would be impossible to get out.

Perhaps Rahela saw Emer was at her limit. She chose her next words carefully.

"What is a person if not a collection of memories? Without remembering, how can I be Rahela? But I've walked miles in Rahela's shoes by now. Why would Rahela tell you that you were nothing to her? Maybe she understood how cruel this world is. Maybe she knew she would die. Maybe she believed it would be best for you, if she cut ties with you. Maybe she loved you, and didn't want to drag you down with her. Maybe you were her sister."

" Shut up! " Emer knotted her fingers in her lady's hair and screamed in her face. "You don't know what she thought!"

They must have both lost their minds. Emer's back burned and grief blazed through her. Rahela was in front of her, but Emer felt she were lost.

The stranger shook her head, black hair flying wildly out of Emer's grasp. "Sometimes rage is all women can give each other. I once screamed at the girl I loved best in the world, because there was nothing but anger left in me. I can't apologize for what I don't remember. I can't be Rahela. I made a bargain with you I never meant to keep. I wish I'd never come to this place. I wish she'd died, and I'd died, and everyone else was safe."

The girl turned away, put her head down on the dressing table and howled like a wild wolf. The gleam of the fallen brush swam in Emer's vision, a silver fish seen through the water. Emer knelt shakily down to retrieve it, wondering why it was so difficult to see, wondering if this was how Lia always saw the world.

Across the room, Lia's charity basket was uncovered. In the basket, neatly folded, were carefully prepared bandages. Enough for two. As if Rahela truly hadn't known Key was doomed from the moment he rose from his knees and struck down the king for her sake.

By now the guards had thrown his corpse away like yesterday's slops. Down into the dread ravine. Meat for the ghouls, or burning in the faraway fires forever. That was the fate of traitors.

Kneeling, Emer reached for her lady's arm and held on tight enough to hurt.

"Do you truly think Rahela was trying to protect me?"

The girl in front of her clutched Emer back, equally desperate. "If she only loved Octavian, it would be too awful. She was nothing to him. Her life and death would mean nothing. I hope she loved you, no matter how badly she showed it. I hope in the end, there was one real thing."

Emer remembered the last day Rahela felt familiar, when her lady whirled around from the locked door and spat in Emer's face that she was done with her. The whole of Emer's past had seemed meaningless, wiped away like words in the sand. She imagined Rahela actually had been put to death the very next day, imagined carrying that weary blankness with her for her whole life, with nothing left but the vicious urge to hurt people the same way she was hurt.

She didn't want to do that. She didn't want to be that.

"I really felt like nothing," she whispered. Suddenly she was crying, a wild fit of weeping. As if she were a child in the cradle, before she learned that a servant's feelings didn't matter. "It really broke my heart. I felt like I wasn't anybody at all."

Her lady nodded, pressing her forehead against Emer's. She was crying too, her whole frame shaking. "You're somebody. You're real."

Between sobs, Emer got out, "If you don't want me to call you Rahela, what should I call you?"

The girl whispered, "Call me Rae."