Heartland

XV

The wind had died during the last hour, and as we sat on a narrow bench near the terrace bar, we weren't cold. Winter had died, and the land was thawing once again toward the season of rebirth.

Marielle was thawing too. The sweat-soaked atmosphere of the boat's interior had melted the icy crust of her opinion of me. The kiss had unlocked both of us, and in the crowd, we had shed some of our old skins. In the sweat thrown from our brows and arms were the liquefied remnants of old habits and old hesitations. All of us gathered in that tiny space gave up something we had been carrying for far too long, and we came out of the metal cocoon wearing new skins, moist with the perspiration of our rebirths.

She stared out at the river, watching the lights of a boat drift by, and while I should have been looking and thinking about other things, I examined her face. My memories were a mess now with Philippe's constantly folding into my own, and my recollection of her went back much further than it should. I could remember her face when she was a tiny baby, and looking at her now, a procession of images strung themselves in my head. A time-lapse vision of Marielle growing from baby to girl to woman.

I reached for her hand and raised it to my lips. I kissed the back of her hand, and her lips quirked into a tiny smile. I kissed her ring finger, and the white marks of my teeth became visible on her skin. The hidden tattoo of our stolen morning together. She turned her hand over so that I might kiss her lifeline, and I did, inhaling her scent.

Philippe's memories were very visual-he didn't store olfactory and auditory triggers-and the memory of Marielle's scent was mine. It had been the same way with Kat; what had survived during the years of trauma was the smell of burning lilacs. Marielle, on the other hand, had an ephemeral scent that was like nightfall in early April, as the ground starts to cool after the sun has gone down, and all the nocturnal flowers are opening. It was a scent that remained indescribable, and I could never quite recall it with confidence, but I always knew it the moment I was in its presence again.

It's a funny way to remember someone: as a sensory phantom haunting you when they are gone. They become a collection of elusive details; you cannot remember them completely, and the more you struggle to put the puzzle together, the more you obsess about the gaps between the pieces. But, when you find these people again, when you crush them to you and inhale their smell, when you hear their voice, when you feel their touch, the pieces arrange themselves and you can't fathom how you didn't see the whole picture before.

Being with her made my heart ache as much as it healed the rifts, for it reminded me of what I had lost in the wood, of what I had let into my soul, and even though I had burned out that disease, there was always going to be a stain. A permanent mark where my humanity had been scarred by the Qliphoth. No matter how much my memory felt whole and complete when I was with Marielle, I was never going to be that way myself. I would always be a patchwork man, no matter how much her presence made me feel otherwise. Because when she was gone, all I would have would be memory, and my memory was far from perfect.

"I dreamt about you a lot after the duel," she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. "Antoine claimed victory and his second Witnessed the event, and that was the official Record. But I kept dreaming about you, as if part of me didn't believe you were truly gone.

"Water dreams. You were drowning, and I would try to save you. At first, I was in a boat and you'd be floating out of reach, and no matter how much I rowed or bailed or tried to raise a sail, I could never reach you in time. You always sank before I could touch you. Later-eight or nine months after the duel-I would find myself on a bridge and you would float by underneath. Like Ophelia, after she drowned herself. It was always a different bridge, as if I was searching for the right one, the one that was low enough that I could lean over the railing and grab you as you went past." She looked at me, and her eyes were bright. "The Record said you fought beneath a bridge, but it didn't say which one, and Antoine would never tell me."

"Pont Alexandre," I said.

She nodded, and seemed to notice I was still holding her hand. She moved her fingers so she could grip mine. "When I was in the boat, your eyes would be open and you would watch me try to reach you, but when the dreams shifted to the bridge, your eyes were always closed. And you started to sink. Each time, you were a little further underwater, until one night, I dreamed of the river and I wasn't on the bridge anymore. I stood on the bank, watching the boats move on the water, and I never saw you again. You were gone, finally, and all that was left was memory."

What is done is done, what is gone is gone.

She opened my hand and examined the lines on my palm. The jagged arc of my love line, the broken strand of my lifeline with its tiny hook near the top and the deep groove it cut into the heel of my thumb. The tiny scars that bit and chewed at the line, never breaking it but transforming it into a spiky branch.

On the night before the duel, the night we had taken for ourselves, she had read my palm. We lay in the large four-poster bed, a king-sized king, surrounded by bolsters and comforters and pillows. We could have been disembodied spirits, lost in a sea of smoke. Like the pair in Toulouse-Lautrec's painting that hangs in the Musee d'Orsay. Marielle had put her hand next to mine, and we had compared lifelines. Hers was smooth and it wrapped all the way around the base of her thumb, seeming to go on forever. I traced it over and over again, like I was following the course of a great river on a map. All the way to its source. Yes, this is where we will go. All the way to where it begins.

The Chorus tickled my spine, and something Philippe had whispered to me floated up again. Nunc. Latin for "now." Both Bernard and Philippe had referenced it, both had said the word as if it was a marker, denoting a separation between the past and the present. This is how it begins.

This is where we will go.

What is done is done.

But that which is gone didn't stay gone. The world rotated, and the cycle bent back on itself. The world ended and began again. Nunc. The word spoken at the beginning, when the cycle starts anew. And where we stood was where it began.

The airport. Marielle had been surprised to see me there. But not in the way you'd expect when someone you thought dead showed up.

"You knew," I said. "You knew I hadn't died under the bridge."

Her lips tightened to a thin line, and she looked out at the river again.

I took her silence as confirmation. "You weren't that surprised to see me at the airport. You weren't expecting me. Not there. Not then. But, you knew I would be back. Almost as if, when I did turn up, you could stop wondering when I was going to. You could stop pretending I was dead."

"I thought you were," she said, and there was venom in her voice. "For a long time."

"Did Antoine tell you?"

She laughed. I had pricked an old wound in her heart, and what was leaking out was bilious and vile. "Why would he do that?" she asked. "That would be tantamount to admitting that he lied. That he failed."

"Failed to do what?"

She ignored my question. "When he came back from his trip to the States, he refused to see me. Father mentioned he had seen Antoine, in passing, as if it was nothing remarkable." Her voice thickened. "But, then, nothing Father ever said wasn't calculated. I knew he wanted me to see Antoine, just as he knew Antoine would refuse. When I called him, he brushed me off. 'I have something to do for your father, my dear'-you know that condescending tone of his-'I have to leave tonight. There isn't any time.' As if he could hide from me, as if I didn't know him well enough to know when he was lying, only because he was so bad at it. He wasn't working for my father. He was going into hiding, until he healed enough that no one would know what had happened to him."

"He went to a spa," I said. "Down in Sardinia, I think."

She nodded as I confirmed what she had suspected. "I could hear it in his voice, and not just because his throat was burned. He had been beaten, and he was going to crawl off and lick his wounds like an injured dog. And I knew there was only one person who could force him to run and hide like that, who could hurt him that badly."

"No," I argued. "There are others-many others-who could have done that."

"But he would have reported the fight; and whatever they had done to him, he would have done worse to them. And he would have been proud of his injuries, because it meant he was stronger. But he didn't. He crept off and hid, which meant he hadn't won. And whoever had bested him had shown him mercy and let him live."

"It wasn't like that."

She laughed again, and the venom bubbled in her throat. "Michael, however you see it doesn't matter. All that matters to Antoine is that you defeated him."

"No, I-"

"Just like you had at the bridge."

"No, he won. That's what the Record-"

She put her hand on my mouth and looked at me intently. "Michael, the Record is wrong. Don't you see? You being alive means Antoine is a liar, and no matter what your intent was or is, his actions are his alone. He has to bear responsibility for them."

My argument fell down through the empty hole that opened in my stomach-a bottomless pit-and I stood very near the rim. Like the Fool, dancing along the cliff's edge, unaware of the danger in front of him. One more step meant disaster.

Was I too late to stop myself? Was I already making that fatal misstep? Philippe had twisted me deep into his design, and Antoine had talked me into believing that he and I had a common goal: after the destruction of Portland, we were no longer enemies, but allies. But could I trust him? Were his actions altruistic or was he simply using me?

Show me altruistic occultism. After what happened in Ravensdale, John Nicols had asked me to show him that we weren't all seeking answers for our own ends, that we were conscious of and capable of a higher morality. Having seen the handiwork of the theurgic mirror, Nicols had wanted to know where he could hope to find a spark of decency. Some sign that mankind wasn't entirely fixated on fucking itself into oblivion. Did such a spark exist, or was belief in it simply an illusion of my own naivete?

What did Antoine want? What did I want, for that matter? Or Marielle?

The spirit of John Nicols morphed into another voice, a more recent addition to the echoes of the Chorus. Lafoutain and his skepticism. Did I trust her? Or was I blinded by the devotion I had inherited from her father? Or my own desire, even? Just as capable, if not more so, in misguiding me.

It is more difficult to live with a woman without danger than to raise the dead to life. Lafoutain had said that pithy aphorism belonged to Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century Cistercian monk who had helped guide the Templars to their glory against the bloody backdrop of the Crusades. Having raised the dead, I was inclined to agree with him, medieval morality aside.

"This isn't your fault," Marielle said, misreading my confusion and silence, and for once, I kept my mouth shut. She removed her hand from my mouth and let it fall to her lap. A shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature on the exposed deck.

"My father had been sick for a long time." She started again. "Or maybe not that long at all. No one can be sure, really, because he kept it secret. He didn't trust anyone with the bad news. The only one who might have known would have been my mother. . " Something akin to a smile moved across her face and she was much younger for a second. So much like the little girl in the field.". . She was the only one he could never hide from. Not completely."

The tiny girl was replaced by an older woman, one filled with a yearning hunger. "That is why he liked you, Michael, you know. Why he took you in so readily. You were like him: bound to none, hidden to all."

That is all you will ever be.

"I was-" She drew in a long breath. "Not an accident. No, he wouldn't like me to call it that. I was unexpected. I wasn't-" She let the breath out in a noisy rush. "-I wasn't a boy. And that complicated things for him. Especially after my mother died. He didn't have a male heir. He didn't have someone he could readily groom to take his place. Whatever vision he had of the organization, of the future, was complicated by the fact that he had to turn it over to someone else. Someone who wasn't his offspring.

"Every father wants to know that his legacy is going to persevere. It isn't just a matter of propagating the species, but a matter of passing along an imprint of what you are and believe. Every parent wants to die knowing that their efforts are growing in the next generation, stronger and richer than they could ever imagine. The society was given a mandate to protect and secure, and Father had to find someone he could trust with this mandate. Really trust. Since it couldn't be his flesh and blood, he had to find someone else."

Her eyes were bright and wet. I reached for her hand and she let me take it. Her skin was getting cold, and I could feel her pulse racing.

"I was-I still am-the Daughter of the Hierarch, and whether I like it or not, I am the prize. Father left everything to me. Material-wise. His villa. His apartments. His library. Everything. He didn't leave it to the society, and whoever becomes Hierarch is going to assume that the way he gets access to my father's legacy is by marrying me. To the victor go the spoils.

"But, the choice is mine. I can't be forced. Father made it very clear-many times over the years-that if I was to. . take up. . with any of the magi in the society, it was because I wanted it, not because I thought he would approve, or because I felt it was the right thing to do for the organization. I was free to choose. Anyone I wanted."

"And you picked Antoine." I hadn't meant to interrupt, but I couldn't stop myself. It came out somewhat sulkily and I wanted to take back the words the moment they left my mouth, but I couldn't. It was the way I felt, even after all this time. Even though I had been the one who had driven the wedge between them in the first place.

It still hurt, deep down in the black loam where the Chorus hid, and it wasn't the rejection, but the fact that Antoine had been right. She would choose him, in the end, because I would break her heart. I hated to admit that he had been right.

A tear tracked down her cheek. "No," she said. "Antoine loves me as best he can, and he would move the world for me. But he-" She stopped, a sad smile moving across her lips.

My heart was pounding in my chest, a noise so loud I was sure she could hear it. I was sure the sudden flush of blood through my veins gave away my every secret. I felt like a fool for reacting to the barest hint in her voice, the tiniest possibility that-

"These last few weeks have been hard. Knowing that the spring renewal was coming, wondering what my father was thinking after what happened in Portland. Wondering what the rest of the organization was going to do," she said. "And when he disappeared two days ago, I knew the time had come. I knew that whatever weight we had been carrying-by virtue of being family and friends-was going to get heavier. . "

— that this whole affair wouldn't end badly for all of us.

". . and I fear the weight will be harder to bear still."

She moved her hands around mine, and gave my fingers a squeeze. "You make such a mess of things, my wolf. You always do."

I flinched, but her grip was stronger than I expected, and I couldn't pull away.

"You throw yourself headlong into everything. You don't know any other way. You don't know what it is to act without passion. Do you remember that night we rode the Ferris wheel at the Tuileries?"

"Of course." My voice cracked.

"We got stuck at the top and it started to rain. You tried to turn it into something else. What was it?"

"Flowers," I said.

"Flowers?" A smile lit her face. "But what did you make instead? What was that?"

I had tried some spell of my own devising. One I had made up on the spot, trying to throw my Will against the elements. I had failed. Badly. "Something else," I said. A smile pulled at my mouth. "Something shit out of the Abyss, probably." It had smelled very foul, and had been sticky, coating us and the wheel and the carriage. There had been no way to gracefully recover. We had sat in the ecto-shit for a half-hour and then calmly walked away from the wheel when it brought us to the ground again as if nothing had happened. I recalled throwing some manner of misdirection glamour on us as we left. Something that had made the experience truly ridiculous enough-more than it was already-that we ended up laughing about the whole thing.

It had always been easy to make her laugh. Back then. I seemed to have lost the knack in the interim.

"My father would have approved," she said, switching gears. She turned my wrist and brushed my fingers open.

"Approved of what?" I asked.

One of her father's tarot cards rested on my palm. I had no idea how it got there. I thought they were all still in my coat pocket. Even after my envenomed vision on the boat where I had spilled them all on the floor. They hadn't left my pocket.

She picked up the card before I could close my hand. "I know you did not kill him because you wanted to."

I started to interrupt her, but she quieted me with a shake of her head. A glance that said, If you don't let me say this, it will never be said.

"I know you did it because he asked you to. I know you did it because it was the only way to heal that which had been broken, to repair the damage done."

What is done is done.

The card was Strength. A woman holds open the mouth of a lion, and as I glanced at the card, the faces changed. Me, holding open Philippe's mouth, his soul streaming out of his body and fusing into an infinity halo over my head.

"I believe you cannot turn away, Michael," she whispered. "I believe in my father's trust in you."

Strength. Philippe's soul flowing into my body, merging with my spirit. His fight becoming mine. His wounds becoming mine. His legacy, becoming mine.

"Okay?" she asked. "No lies between us."

Strength.

"Okay."

I wanted to kiss her then. To pretend it was five years ago and we were still innocent and unaware of the future. That we were still in that other bedroom, flush with the fantasy of New Year's Eve and living on the cusp of something new. It hadn't happened yet, and as long as we didn't move, as long as we didn't leave that bed, nothing would happen. We would stay safe, and the future would never come. Or that we were still on the dance floor, caught in the lock groove, circling one another as if we were the only two bodies in the entire galaxy. Exerting an inexorable pull on one another.

But there was a fire in my head. Furious sparks that weren't mine. I couldn't put them out, as much as I wanted to. They were the present and the future, and the past was getting more distant and more muddled with every hour. I couldn't go back, not without losing my mind. I had to go forward. I had to accept what I had become.

Strength.

I told Marielle how her father died and what happened to him afterward. To her credit, she took it really well.

But, then, I was pretty sure she already knew.