Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Eleven

The grace she gave him every day at dusk was private.

It had become routine in the way that things became routine between two people who shared a small house and a common purpose by accretion, one day's repetition building on another's until whether to do it dissolved into simply doing it. He would come in from the village at the end of the afternoon, and she would be in the kitchen, and without discussion, he would sit in the chair by the fire, and she would stand behind him and put her hands on his shoulders and push warmth into the damaged places.

The plague in him was stubborn. It retreated under her grace and gathered itself and came back when she stopped steadily, with the patience of something that knew it had time. What she was doing was not healing. She understood that now with clarity. That was itself a kind of pain. She was holding a door shut, something strong pressing against it.

"You're doing it again," Aldric said. His eyes were closed, his head slightly bowed.

"Doing what?"

"The thing where you've followed a thought to its conclusion, and you don't like where it's gone. I can tell by the change in the pressure of your hands."

She adjusted her hands. He noticed anyway.

"I am thinking about what this means beyond the immediate," she said carefully.

"About what happens to me when you leave."

"Yes."

"Don't," he said without self-pity, just a plain statement. "Not yet. We have now. Think about now."

She considered that. She had been, for a thousand years, a creature of pattern and horizon, always aware of the long consequences. The fact that 'now' was a thing a person could choose to occupy struck her as both foreign and deeply human.

"Mira gets out of bed tomorrow for the first time," she said.

"She's been out of bed twice this week when she thinks no one is watching."

"I know. I watched her."

"She can never resist," he stopped. Laughed, quietly, a sound she had learned to like precisely because it was rare and therefore genuine. "She's always been like that. Sees a rule and immediately starts testing its edges."

"She is very like you."

"God help her, then."

Seraphel felt the warmth in her hands do something unexpected: move not just toward the plague but outward, toward something else in him, something that was not sick but lonely, in a way that illness and loneliness intersected. She pulled back before she did something she was not permitted to do.

She stepped away. He looked over his shoulder at her. "Done?"

"For tonight."

He stood. He was taller than she by several inches, and in the firelight, the lines of his face had that quality of tiredness that was not weakness, just the weight of everything settling visibly for a moment before he picked it back up.

"Seraphel."

"Yes."

"Thank you," he said, the way he said the most important things, simply, directly, without ornamentation, looking at her. "Not for tonight specifically. For all of it."

She did not have an adequate response. She discovered, standing in the kitchen of a dead man's house in a plague-struck English village, that the inadequacy of her response was itself telling her something she had not been quite listening to.

"Sleep," she said. "Tomorrow will be long."

He went. She stayed by the fire, and she thought not about the long consequences, not about the horizon, but about now. About this. About the feeling in her hands that she had wanted to give him more than she was permitted.

She sat with it, as mortals sat with difficult things, and let it have its full shape.

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