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Not for Cecily’s abandoned flesh.
“What do you want me to see?” I finally asked Fafnir, glancing up at his lined face.
He gestured at the table. “She’s still here. She’s not gone at all.”
Was that an insane glint in his eye? His thoughts roiled with jumbled excitement, hope and dread, making it difficult for me to sort.
Treading carefully, I said, “The flesh she wore remains, but it no longer lives. The person she was, the life that occupied this flesh, has gone.”
Rogue’s hand trailed lightly down my spine. In comfort or warning, I wasn’t sure.
Fafnir cocked his head in that listening way. “I don’t understand.”
“This is simply a…leftover. It’s nother.”
“I know it’s not her,” he replied, full of impatience. “That’s why I need you. Remake her.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” My own impatience simmered up. “Look—what happens if one of the lesser fae die?”
Fafnir gave me that look, like I’d said something absurd, and Rogue’s thoughts tracked along with curiosity. I wasn’t making any more sense to them than they were to me.
“Back when I was at Falcon’s camp, a page caught on fire. He was too damaged to survive and his body stopped functioning. What do you say would have happened to him?”
Come to think of it, I didn’t know, myself. I’d observed his lifeless body, just as I’d seen Dragonfly’s, which Rogue had sent out to sea. But what of funerals and so forth?
“They…” Fafnir seemed to be searching for the words. “Go into the water and come back out again.”
“How?” I pounced on that, thinking of the hatching cavern and how that cycle might work.
“By swimming.” he answered, clearly pleased to give me a finite answer. I wanted to clutch my skull in frustration, but that would get neither of us anywhere.
“Let me try this—let’s say that page who burned went into the sea and reemerged alive again. Would he remember what had occurred?”
Fafnir gazed down at Cecily’s mummified corpse with utter adoration. “I don’t need for her to remember. Perhaps it’s better if she does not. We’ll make a new life. Without…” His gaze shifted behind me to Rogue. “Perhaps we shall triumph and we can simply live.”
“Perhaps so,” Rogue answered.
“All I ask, Sorceress, is that you try.” Fafnir transferred his urgent gaze to me, silver-gray eyes tumbling with a dust storm of long-dry feeling. “I beg of you. If not for me or for her, then for your own future.” In his mind, he held an idea, of a time and place that could be real for us all, free of the horrors he’d suffered. Of a kind of paradise.
He didn’t have to explain more. Rogue held his mind closed, but in the core of him, where we seemed to remain entirely open to one another, his quiet dread grew like a mold over Fafnir’s image of paradise. He hated that it could be me on that table. Not like I hadn’t tried to warn him.
Still, I sighed and stretched out my senses. The cat, interested, flowed along too and I didn’t dissuade her. She liked the arena and remembered the fun we’d had play-fighting here. As long as she behaved, I didn’t mind her being awake. In some ways, it seemed her presence helped buffer the nagging pains in my body.
The bubble of Rogue’s magic, a seamless field of black-edged blue, resisted my efforts with a sense of inertness that reminded me of the dragons’ null magic. Interesting. “I need you to drop the field,” I said to him aloud, so Fafnir would know I made an effort.
“Not the whole thing,” he murmured, sliding his hand back up my spine to settle at the nape of my neck. “But a window. Where do you want it?”
It didn’t matter. I picked anyway. “Over her forehead.”
The ancients might have thought the seat of the soul resided in the heart or the center of the body. I, however, was a neuroscientist and I believed in the brain.
I almost saw the hole open. Very small, a pinpoint flaw in the shield. Slipping a mental probe in the opening he made, I quickly agreed with Rogue’s reasoning. The corpse tasted of ash, indeed. The tissues fluttered in the slight breath of my thought’s passage as dried leaves stirred by autumn winds, losing their tenuous hold on the branches that once gave them life.
Nothing of life remained in the dried corpse of Fafnir’s lady love. No cords of life bound her to him or to anything in the world.
Except.
Anchoring myself to Rogue, like grabbing his hand so I could lean over the edge of a cliff, I looked not out, but in.
