I know this
1202 Words
CASPIAN
The sixth lifetime began badly.
This is perhaps not a remarkable observation — they have all, in their ways, begun badly, the Serapha arriving already burdened, already frightened, already in possession of an inheritance she didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have chosen. But the sixth had a particular quality of difficulty I had not encountered before, which is that she arrived already angry.
Her name was Ismene. She was twenty-three, which was older than most, and she had been found late — the calling had come to her at eighteen and she had spent five years refusing it with a thoroughness I found, even then, reluctantly impressive. By the time the Goddess had made refusal sufficiently uncomfortable that she arrived at the castle gates, she had developed a comprehensive theory of the situation, and she had opinions about every element of it, including me.
“You’re the guardian,” she said, when I opened the gate. Not a question.
“I am.”
“You’ve done this five times before.”
“Yes.”
“And they all died.”
I looked at her. She looked back with the directness of someone who had decided that if she was going to be here she was at least going to be honest about where here was. “Yes,” I said. “They all died.”
“Wonderful,” she said, and came inside.
Farah makes a sound that is not quite a laugh.
“She sounds remarkable,” she says.
“She was exhausting,” I say, “and yes.” I consider. “She was twenty-three and furious and she had spent five years developing arguments against a divine compulsion, which meant she had also spent five years honing a kind of intellectual precision that had no appropriate outlet and was now entirely directed at me. Every assumption I had ever made about the role — the distance, the methodology — she had a question for it. She didn’t ask to be difficult. She asked because she genuinely wanted the answers and had not yet learned to be afraid of what the answers might require of her.”
“Did it change anything? The questioning?”
“Not the trials. The trials were what they were.” I look at the dim coals. “But the asking changed me. There is a difference between accepting a thing because you have examined it and found acceptance to be the only viable response, and accepting it because it has not occurred to you to look directly at it. I had been doing the latter for five lifetimes. Ismene made it untenable for me to go on believing they were the same.”
Farah is quiet. The fire has gone mostly to embers now, throwing a low red light that has made the room into something that feels neither quite present nor quite past.
“You said the sixth was different,” she says. “Not better. What was different?”
This is the right question. I can tell it is the right question because I feel it locate something I have been building toward without knowing it.
“I was honest with her,” I say.
I let that sit for a moment.
“Not at first. At first I deployed the methodology as I always had. But Ismene made no distinction between the academic and the personal — she asked questions about the curse and questions about me with the same tone, the same quality of genuine interest. And at some point she asked me, very directly, whether I was ever afraid.” I pause. “I told her yes.”
The room holds this.
“I told her yes, and nothing happened. The terms did not change. The world did not reorganize. I had told the truth about my interior to someone I was supposed to be managing distance from, and the consequence was simply that she nodded and said she was afraid too, and would I like to play chess.”
The corner of Farah’s mouth moves. “Chess.”
“She was infuriatingly good at it. She talked while she played — about her life before the calling, about the people she’d left, about what she would have done differently. She had been training to be a physician. She would have been extraordinary at it.” I stop. Hear myself. “I’m doing the catalogue thing.”
“You are,” Farah says, without sharpness.
“What I mean to say is that she was — she became someone I knew. Not a ward I was monitoring. A person I knew, who knew me, and the knowing ran in both directions, and I had forgotten that was a thing that could happen.” I am quiet for a moment. “She died on the third trial. No interference that time. The trial itself. She was clever and she was brave and she was willing, in the end, and she was twenty-four.”
Farah doesn’t speak for a while.
Outside, the castle breathes.
“After,” she says finally. “What did you do?”
“I catalogued the medical texts. Every one in the library, in the order she would have organized them. It took eleven months. It was useful, to have something to do with my hands.” I look at the dead fire. “And then the between time came, and I was alone with it. And it was different. Because I had been honest with her. I had told her I was afraid and played chess with her in the evenings and let the door stay open, and I lost her exactly as much as I had lost the others.” I stop. “The difference was only that I had also had the evenings.”
Farah is very still.
“I have thought about this for a long time,” I say. “Whether it was better or worse. Having had the evenings.”
“And?”
I look at her — across the dark room, across the dead fire, across four days and six lifetimes and one question I have been carrying for longer than she has been alive.
“Better,” I say. “Impossibly, inconveniently, entirely irrationally — better.”
She holds my gaze with that quality of steadiness I have stopped trying to find a reason to look away from. Something in her face settles, not into relief exactly, but into the particular stillness of someone who has been waiting to see if a thing is true and has now received their answer.
“That seems,” she says, carefully, “like important information.”
“It does,” I agree.
Neither of us says anything after that. The coals breathe their last faint heat into the room. The hour has become something it is not polite to name, and I know the responsible architecture of this conversation has an ending somewhere — a return to appropriate arrangements, a sensible goodnight.
I know this.
I don’t say it.
And neither, I notice, does she.
- Writer
