2.32. Karmen

Lisa plucked Seth off her and turned him onto his back. She stood from the bed, swiping a linen cloth from its place in a half-opened drawer and conducting a cursory cleaning of herself. “I will be right back,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.

“What? Lisa, come on. We have to—”

“I will.” A pale gleam drifted down her thigh. She daubed it away and tugged a pair of panties on. “I promise. But if we are going to talk about Karmen, the wine from the reception will not suffice. I will require something stiffer and in larger quantities. Shall I bring you a glass?”

He nodded.

“To be continued,” she said, and slipped out the door.

Seth lay on his back in her bed—in their bed, his and hers—and listened to the tap of her bare feet on the dark hardwood floor and studied the draping canopy above the bed. Was she formulating the right lie out there? Or only looking for the right wine?

She returned with a bottle whose opaque surface she’d studiously wiped the dust from, and two long-stem glasses, both etched with intricately rendered steeples. She handed one to Seth and filled with sweetly spiced garnacha.

“So,” she said, moving on to her own. “What did she tell you?”

“What did you think she was saying?” Seth asked. “About Alice, I mean.”

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Let’s address this little yarn Desdemona spun.”

”She told me that Lisa’s donor was a companion,” he said. “Like Nik was.” Like I am.

“Mmm. She was telling…” Lisa tilted her head. “Two-thirds of the truth. Which with Desdemona is the closest you’ll get. The sorceress whose face I now wear was named Karmen.”

“You’ve mentioned,” Seth said, and drank. Vanilla, cocoa, drupelet. The stately aged timbres of oak and leather. He hadn’t had wine this fine since… well, since the last red Lisa had served him.

“Karmen was an atypical hire, to say the least.” She rolled her fingertips at the rim of the glass. “But you know me. I see potential in places that a proper officer of the Legion would not.”

“Thieves, for instance.”

“Thieves now, hedge witches then. Her village had taken her in on dark suspicions. They claimed she was a maleficar. That she was unlicensed.” Lisa brought her cup to her lips. Twice as much liquid as Seth had drawn, for twice as much the drinker. “She claimed she’d done her tours in the Winter War, and had received her decommission with honors. I found out later that wasn’t true. She claimed her assigned minder had passed of the weeping fever; another lie. But she claimed she knew the siege spell, and more besides, and that she was a prodigy. And that was honest. But it wasn’t the real reason I took her in.”

“What was?”

“She had the look,” Lisa said. “The look of someone whose life had been one slamming door after another. Of someone with a gift to give, and no one in the world who’d accept it.”

My look, Seth thought, and drank.

“I let her head stay on its shoulders, and told myself that I could keep her on the straight-and-narrow, and she would be useful.” Lisa took her crystal glass down to its halfway point. The red meniscus clung to the steeple’s belfry. “For a while, she was. For a while we were friends.”

“A season and a half, I was told,” Seth said.

“Give or take a few months.” Lisa wiggled her hand noncommittally. “But they kept coming up, those problems. A little thing here, a not-so-little one there. She began to fall back on unfortunate habits. She begged me, now and then, for access to my sword’s hexis. The dynamos were like tiny windows to her old life. The spells she’d learned and the experiments I’d halted. She said she only wanted to be useful, and I believed it, and still do. But every time I told her no, she took it worse and worse. I reminded her of the promise she’d made, to leave it all behind. And I knew she was trying, it was just…”

She sighed. Remembering this hurt. The urge to tell her this was enough, that he understood, gnawed at him. But how many times had she ever opened up like this about her past?

“It was too far into her,” she said. “To the bone. And when she broke her promise, it burst with all the tension it had been holding.”

“What did she do?”

“She seduced a man and then killed him for his hexis in a sacrificial blood orgy,” Lisa said.

“Oh,” Seth said. He took another drink. When had this glass gotten so low?

“On the scaffold she told me she was sorry,” Lisa said. “She told me she’d tried her best. But there was this noise there, always there, and my mistake was trying to surround her with quiet, when the noise was coming from inside. All the silence did was make it louder.”

In Seth’s mind, al Vhesse’s thin face melded with another. A man looking onto the horizon, muttering: Someone new. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?

Lisa placed her cup on the nightstand and slid closer. “I learned a hard lesson with Karmen. I thought I’d turned her around; all I did was bend her further out of true. I will not make that mistake again.”

“I can’t imagine you running around with my skull on your shoulders anyway,” he said.

“As infatuated as I am with your cheekbones, no.” She caressed his face pensively. “No, I only really truck with the lady-heads, and only with ones whose previous owners permitted it. I tried an enemy’s head, once, and the resentment she bore me remained, scratching at my mind. It was all I could do to swap that mistake out again before I took the sword to myself in vengeance. A thoroughly rotten psychic experience.”

“So she told you to use her, like Nik did?”

“I think I’ve told you this part,” Lisa said. “She called it a horrible shame to let all she’d collected in it flow away with her and be threshed away by the Turning Wheel. I had my doubts. What if I inherited some of her predilections?”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t think so at the time,” she said. “But then I met a boy and kept getting the urge to do the most perverse things to him. So I suppose I did, in part. Though I do promise never to use you in a sacrificial blood orgy.”

“That is wonderful news.”

“But part of her. The avaricious part. The part that despises the idea of letting others have what she has claimed, or keep her from what she wants. I feel it, every time I’m Lisa. And even when I’m Annalise, it’s there. Whispering to me.”

“I thought—when you gave me meadowsweet, I thought it was all play.”

“It is play,” she said. “Some—most of it. But can I tell you? I didn’t want to give it up. Your soul. I wanted to keep it. There was a moment there on the Psychelith I wanted to stop you. Of course that would have been madness. Of course. It’s far safer in there. But…”

Her hand spread out across his heart.

“But to possess you,” she whispered. “All the beautiful things that make you yourself. To hold your existence in my hands and know it belonged to me. That you belonged to me. That you could never leave me. Even when I was Annalise, I felt it, stronger than I ever had. It intoxicated me. After everything I’ve lost. So much. A whole life. A man I thought I loved. And I thought I’d earned the horror. That I deserved it.”

“Never,” he said. “Never ever could you have deserved that.”

“I know that, now,” she said. “I knew it the very first time I put on Lisa, in fact. That voice of reason was so quietwhenever she was packed away and I was Annalise. And then something happened, Seth, on our first night. Something I still don’t entirely understand. Annalise and Lisa… they’ve blended. They’ve aligned.” She tapped her temple. “In here. I used to feel so bad when I had to become Annalise again. So resentful. Like I was disappearing. Changing too much, I suppose, and not into someone I liked. And that’s all done with now, thanks to you. Granted, she’s still a tall pint and I’m still—what did we call it?”

“A fancy foofy bubbly red.”

Lisa scoffed. “Fancy and bubbly do not belong as bedfellows with red.I’d call myself something velvety and smoky, thank you very much. Which reminds me.” She topped herself up. “More, lover?”

“I shouldn’t,” he said, holding his cup out to be refilled. “Cheers.”

They clinked and drank.

“But I know what you mean,” he said. “When you kissed me. You kiss the same. And you went a little Orwinese when you made me bleed.”

Lisa covered her face. “Don’t remind me.”

“And Annalise has gotten handsy.”

“Handsy is for fumbling teenagers. Annalise has gotten amorous.”

“What’s the difference?” Seth asked.

Lisa seized him, straddled him, and showed him.

With her tongue filling his mouth and her stomach pushing against his he realized how drunk she was, and in short order how drunk he was.

“I’m Annalise and Lisa,” she whispered, when she finally showed mercy enough to release him. Her breath was hot and wet and wine-sweet. “I’m both at once. I thought I already was, but there was discord in me, and you’ve ended it. And now, if I am keeping anything from you, any of the tragedies of my past, it’s only because both of me are so desperate not to lose you. And terrified of it. Of not being enough. Of showing you too much of the blood that stains my history, too many of the scars. Of making some mistake and seeing you run from me. But turning it into a… game. If I dress it up all frightful and garish, it can be a sexy joke. Something I don’t have to look at.”

“You won’t lose me,” he promised, between the kisses he was desperately raining onto her neck. “I swear to every Saint in the fucking house. I swear to the wheel. You won’t.”

“I don’t know what Desdemona told you.” She stretched his arms above his head, pressing his hands between the headboard and her sweating palm. “I don’t need to; it doesn’t matter. Only remember that you are not like Karmen, because I don’t need you to change. I don’t need you to be heroic or selfless or courageous or anything at all. I only need you to be mine. My Seth. That’s all you ever have to do. Just be mine.”

She giggled softly. A tear gathered in her eye.

“And isn’t that a pathetic thing to say? What must you think of me? Still the lovesick Orwinese maiden after all this time. Still so desperately fond, so simple. How horribly I was hurt the first time, and how little I learned. How horribly youcould hurt me, if you wanted to. How badly I’m rushing. How we’ve not even known each other a year, and… and already, all I want is…”

Her finger hooked around his. Right below the first knuckle, where a ring would sit.

“It’s quite pathetic, isn’t it?” she whispered.

His stomach backflipped. He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten hard again but there it was, as lost to its fierce yearning as his drunken mind.

“This is a Lisa thing.” She shook herself off him. “A drunken Lisa thing. Ignore me. Let’s forget I said anything. All right? I already rushed us once and it nearly ruined us. I am happy. Deliriously happy with what I have of you.”

“I would,” he said, and Oh fuck, he would. He was drunk, but it was the kind that refracted the mind to a point, like a magnifying glass held to the sun. The kind that brings out an unassailable truth. “I’d marry you. I’d marry you today.”

“Let’s talk when I’m Annalise,” she said. “And we’re sober.”

“I wanna be Seth al Ydris.” His eyes stung. “I fucking hate how il Gutierre sounds. It sounds like someone’s getting ready to spit.”

“No it doesn’t.” She gasped in protest. “I love it.”

“I want to be rid of it.” He clung to her with the dizzying revelation. “I want to be an al Ydris. I fucking love the al Ydrises. I love Tiago and Ofelia.”

“They love you, Seth. I’ve never seen them open up to anyone like they have to you. Not since—not since I went to the Winter War.” She let out an adorable little burp and sat up. “Saints. I have to get out of this bed before I fucking propose to you. What time is it?”

He shook his head out in a doomed effort to banish the wedding bells from his brain. He craned his neck over her shoulder and saw the cabinet clock. “Five-ish.”

“Right-o,” she said, and rolled off him. “Here’s the plan.”

“The plan,” he echoed.

“I’m going to pick you up,” she said, and picked him up.

“This is a great plan,” he said.

“And we’ll bathe together.” She carried him to the en suite bathroom. “And then we’ll have a late lunch or early dinner or whatever we’d like to call it, and then we’ll make love again.” With her foot she turned the spigot on her big brass tub. “And I’ll be back in stern mistress mode, but I want to suck your cock, so I need to root around in this brain and work out how stern mistresses suck cock.”

“I believe in you,” he said, as warm water drummed into the tub.

“But I won’t break your nose this time.”

“You didn’t break my nose.”

“My streak shall continue.” She placed him in the tub. “And tomorrow we’ll sleep in, and then I’ll buy you more clothes so you treat them worse and I can rip them off you.”

“Okay.” He pointed a warning finger through the rising steam. “But not the first uniform.”

“Fine, not that one. But the second and third and so on.”

She drummed her palms on the edge of the tub, then clambered in to join him. The water level rose to his chest.

“And then,” she said, scooping him against her with a slosh, “we’ll watch my son have his little swordfight.”

It was an hour later, with her hair in his fist and her lips around his cock, that Seth dimly recalled she’d never answered his question about Alice, and it wasn’t until the next day that he understood why.

They met at midday outside the city walls, the two duelists, on a hill whose name—Swordsman’s Knoll—made its lineage for the event obvious. The great oak beneath which they stood was covered with knuckles and knotted-over scars.

Around them, a semicircle of sable-wearing observers. Some were gossips or gadflies drawn by the promise of Legion blood. Some were fellow officers to judge by their badges and sashes and frogging. One was Lisa, who as a duelist’s Exark was not allowed to stand close. Presumably that ox-shouldered man with the mustache and the sour expression was Leonane’s Exark. Seth had thought it might be Desdemona, had scanned the crowd for her spidery frame, but that wasn’t possible, Ofelia had told him; Leonane was part of the Legionnaire corps and she was a Verdugo. Whatever patronage she offered was informal and whatever loyalty he gave back was purely suck-uppery.

Leonane al Proiet had brought a finely balanced saber whose basket hilt gleamed with orchard-leaf flourishes. The blade’s flat was etched in jade with a dozen al Proiet names along its silvery span, and as he turned it the light caught its mirror and refracted it into a blinding white penstroke upon the world, a work of military calligraphy as much art as weapon.

Tiago had brought his sword.

Dispassionately he undid the drawstring on the field coat and doffed his bicorne. This cluster of felt and brocade he handed off to his silent sister, who waited nearby as his second.

Leonane’s second was one of his hyenas. In passing off his coat and cap, the Lanzcapitan whispered something just below hearing that set them back into boyish laughing again.

Something strange: Tiago laughed too, beneath his breath, like a private joke. Leonane’s face went cold.

“Let us dispatch and be done, Teniyant,” he said. “I have more pressing matters than sparing the wounded pride of your provincials.”

“Yes,” Tiago said. “Let’s.”

The judge for this affair, a man with a capitan’s fringe cassock and a head as bald and shiny as a cueball, bellowed in impressive baritone that sent shushes and jostles into the crowd: “Bring forth the basin of Saint Savua.”

Tiago paced the hill to where his retinue—such as it was—had gathered. A slimmer group than Leonane’s knuckle-dragging fraternity: just Seth and Ofelia, and Riccana standing behind them. “I’m sorry for all this,” Tiago said to her. “For dragging your name into it.”

“I’ll wait to accept your apology until the duel is over, goodman, if you pardon,” Riccana said.

“Why’s that, madam?”

“Because an apology from a man who challenged and lost differs from that of a man who fed that prick his teeth.”

Tiago chuckled.

“In the stories the maidens do this thing where they hand the man a handkerchief,” Riccana said. “But I usually use my sleeve, to be honest. Don’t have one.”

“Me neither.” Tiago held up his forearm. Riccana bumped hers against it.

Ofelia gave Seth a meaningful nudge. He returned a yes, I’m seeing it type of look.

“Teniyant al Ydris, sir,” a woman called from the crowd. A pretty Sektoric, tall and thundrously browed, with a plaited sideshave and a bicorne under her arm. “I will be watching your off-hand. I imagine Lanzcapitan al Proiet will do the same. It is a tell, sir.”

“It’s been a long year since you saw me, Teniyant,” Tiago said. “Your intelligence is stale.”

“You’ve learned, then, to keep from those ugly gesticulations?”

Tiago smiled coldly. “Perhaps a demonstration, Madam.”

Her responding smile was at absolute zero. “Perhaps.”

“Who’s that?” Riccana whispered to Ofelia. Was it Seth’s imagination or did she look put off?

“Teniyant Chondra il Aphaz,” Ofelia whispered back. “A goddamned prodigy, I’m afraid. The only soldier in the Teniyant class with a valid claim on outmatching my brother, not that they’ve ever fought. I despise her, as is my sisterly duty, but also I am agonizingly attracted to her.”

“A truly star-crossed affair,” Seth noted.

“It certainly would be,” Ofelia said. “If she so much as knew my name.”

“You don’t think so?” Seth asked.

“Chondra pays precious little attention to anything that isn’t swords or swordspersons.”

“Surely you count as a swords-adjacent person, at least.”

“I use them now and then,” Ofelia said. “I have never pleasured myself at the imagining of one, as Chondra and Tiago have.”

“If my nemesis had a sister, I would definitely get with her as a mind game,” Seth said.

“A strategy pale in effectiveness compared to their mother, surely,” Ofelia said, which finished that exchange.

“May the cooling waters of Saint Savua’s discipline temper the heat of this disagreement,” the saintspeaker intoned, thin arms trembling somewhat under the heavy-bottomed marble bowl she’d carted up Swordsman’s Knoll. “That by her grace and the grace of her brother Saint Silas comvel egytmak preliyazikonflict, and fellowship be drawn in the blood of the conflict.” She held forth the basin. Clear water sloshed within. “Salutiy.”

“Salut, oratiyant,” the duelists said, in canticle unison.

Tiago dipped his sword into the crystal water. The tremors in the basin’s surface cast their reflection across his solemn face like pale smoke. He stepped away and nodded to Lanzcapital Leonane, who took the same slow sacred moment—though he was gnawing his lip, and his eyes lit back and forth from the surface of the water to his patient opponent.

The moment Leonane paced back to his spot, Tiago drew the blade up sharply to a vertical between his eyes that set drops coruscating from the strip of metal. “Salut, Exark,” he called to Lisa, who responded only with an icy tilt of her chin, though Seth could tell even from this distance that there was a smile in her eyes.

With a brisk thwip Tiago’s swordpoint lanced outward across the ten-span gap between him and his foe. His slim fingers were loose and light around the well-worn hilt. “Salut, soldat,” he said. “May your mocking tongue be chastened.”

Proiet pointed his own blade out. For all the nerves he’d shown, its curved tip was still as a gravepost. “Salut, soldat,” he said. “May your pretense be punctured.”

Leonane’s second squinted at Ofelia. “Salut, secondi. May your house be humbled.”

“Salut, secondi, and et cetera,” Ofelia said.

And that, apparently, was that, because then a silence fell upon the hill.