The Lullaby I Never Learned

She is looking at my throat.

There is a long moment. A coal gives and resettles. Nothing in the room moves but the fire, and I sit in the guest's chair an arm's length from a nine-hundred-year-old hunger with my pulse going up into the place she is looking, loud, stupid, alive, the one clock left running in a house full of stopped ones, and I understand that this is the moment. Not later. Not in some abduction the grain keeps half-promising me. Now, by a built-up fire, over the cooling tea, a reasonable woman is going to lean across the hearth and open me up like a vein of colour she has waited three centuries to grind, and the worst of it, the thing that turns the swab of me to water, is that I do not think she has decided to. I think she is past deciding. I have stood over enough ruined paint to know the look of a surface that is going to lift no matter how carefully you breathe, and her face has it. The kindness is gone and what is under the kindness was always going to be under it. It is just that the varnish has finally come off.

I do not move.

The grain holds me down, calm, watchful, and it is the strangest thing to be more afraid of myself than of her, to feel the part painted under my life lean into the danger the way I lean toward a panel when the lamp comes up and shows me the underdrawing, hungry in its own way, willing this, almost, and somewhere in the cold clear depth of it a woman who has sat across from starving immortals before is saying again, without words, in the language I never learned, hold still, let her come, she will not be the one who decides what it means.

And then, because the grain is leaning and I am terrified and the two of us are one throat she is staring at, the lullaby comes.

It comes the way it came on the bench at Verraday with the swab in my hand, unbidden, fully formed, except louder now, closer, not a memory of a tune but the tune itself rising up through me from somewhere under the floor of my own life, and it is in my mouth before I know I have a mouth, low, almost not a sound at all, a few notes and then a line of words in a language I have never learned and have always known, soft and falling, the cadence of a thing you sing over a cradle or over a deathbed, the two not being so very far apart. I am not singing to comfort myself. I do not know why I am singing. I only know that the grain has reached up through me and taken my voice the way the cold takes a window, and put this in it, and let it out into the room toward the woman who is starving an arm's length away.

Renata stops.

It is not a small stopping. It is the stopping of a thing that was already in motion, a weight already past its balance, caught. The hunger does not leave her face, the hunger has nowhere to go, but something else comes into it on top of the hunger, over it, and I watch it land the way I watch a varnish go on, a clear coat sinking into a surface and changing every colour under it without moving one of them, and what it changes the hunger into is grief. Old grief. Grief with the dust of nine centuries on it, grief gone to architecture the same way her beauty has, and her amber eyes come up off my throat at last and find my face, and they are wet, which I would not have believed a thing that old could still do.

"Stop," she says. It is barely a word. "Stop that."

I do not stop. I cannot. The grain has the reins and it is not finished, it has more of the falling line to give her, and I sit there with my hands around the cup singing a cradle song in a dead language to a monster while the monster comes apart in the chair across the fire, and over by the door I am aware of Sabre, of the absolute stillness of him, the stillness of a man who has just watched the thing he has been deciding about for nine days decide something on its own, and I cannot look at him, I can only look at her, because she is the one the song is for.

"Where did you learn that." Renata's voice has lost its velvet entirely. There is a young woman in it suddenly, a woman from before the architecture, and she is afraid. "Who taught you that. No. No, do not, I know who. I know whose mouth that came out of. I sat in a room while she sang that, do you understand, I sat against a wall in a cold room and I hated her with my whole heart and she sang that over a man who was dying and I have not heard it in a thousand years and you do not get to have it, you do not get to sit there with her hands and her mouth and her song and not even know that you are doing it."

The grain, hearing this, goes quiet. The song stops, not because I stop it, but because it has done what it came to do. The last note hangs and then the fire takes it.

"I don't know what I'm doing," I say. The first words I have spoken since Sabre told me not to speak, and I hear him move at the sound of them, half a motion and then nothing, because we are well past his rules now, his rules and her reason both lying on the floor like overpaint that has come away in one sheet. "I don't know the words. I have never known the words. I don't know why I have her hands." My voice is shaking and I let it. "Tell me what I am. You said you would. He won't, and you said you would, so tell me, because I just sang a song I have never learned to a woman who wants to drink me and I would very much like to know why before one of us does something we can't take back."

For a moment I think she will. The mouth opens, the architecture cracks, the word is right there behind her teeth the way it was a minute ago before the song stopped her, and the grain in me leans up to meet it, the floor of myself sliding forward again, ready, almost wanting, to be told at last what it is that has been wearing me like a coat.

And Sabre says, not to me, not even loudly, "Do not."

He has crossed the room. I did not see him cross it. He is between us now, not with the careful quarter-turn this time but standing fully in the gap, close enough to the fire that the light goes through the amber of his own eyes and shows me, for one instant, that they are the same colour as hers, the same three-centuries-of-candle-smoke amber, varnish over something that used to be another colour entirely, and I think, with the cold falling clarity, of course they are. Of course. He made her. He must have made all of them, in the end, every amber-eyed thing that drives through the dark toward me, and the thought is too big and I put it down where I put the rest.

"You do not get to do that," Sabre says to Renata, very quietly. "You do not get to be the one who tells her. You came to keep her asleep and you have just spent the last minute weeping because she is more awake than you have ever seen her, and now you want to wake her the rest of the way out of spite, because she sang your jealousy back to you across a thousand years. No. If she is told, she is told gently, and slowly, and by someone who is not starving, and that is the one thing in this room that you are not."

"And you are gentle," Renata says. The wet is gone from her eyes now, frozen back over. "You. Who decided for her nine days ago and would decide for her every day until the world ends. You are not keeping her gentle, Sabre. You are keeping her yours, and you have not even had the courage to take her yet, and so you keep her ignorant instead, which is the only way a coward marks a thing he is afraid to want."

The word marks goes through me cold, and I do not know yet why it should, only that the grain flinches at it the way I flinched at the doorway, a body refusing a thing before the mind has it, and I file it, I file it hard, under the truth I will examine later if there is a later.

"Get out of my house," Sabre says.

"I will go," Renata says, rising, the soft grey coat falling back into its expensive lines, the architecture rebuilt, the whole terrible reasonable woman reassembled over the young one who wept a moment ago, "because the song has rather spoiled my appetite, and because you are right that the others are coming and I would prefer not to be found here arguing with you when they do." She looks at me one last time, and the almost-kindness is back, and now I know exactly what is under it and it is no kinder for being named. "Sing that to the next one who comes, child. It will not stop them. It only stopped me because I am old enough to have been there. But sing it anyway. It is the only true thing you have, and you do not even know it is yours."

She turns toward the arch, toward the low doorway my whole body still refuses, and she pauses there, framed, her hand rising once more to the cold stone of the frame exactly as it rose when she came in, exactly as the woman on my bench at Verraday raised hers before some coward painted it down, and over her shoulder, almost gently, she says the thing that empties the room.

"You should ask him," Renata says, "about the other one I brought. The one in the car who is still breathing. You have been so busy with me, the pair of you, that neither of you has thought to wonder why a woman who came to keep you asleep would bring a living mortal to the Founder's door." Her amber eyes find mine and hold. "I would go and look, if I were you. Before he decides you do not need to know that either."

And she is gone into the dark, and out in the cold of the drive a car door opens, expensive, final, and from inside the car, thin and high and unmistakably alive, comes a voice I have known my whole life, the voice that was photographed and praised and measured against me at every dinner table we ever sat at, calling my name into the night.

Bea.