Caine's Law (60 page)

“Everything you are is what you should be. Everything you should be is what you are
.

“I know all of you, and there is nothing in you I do not love.”

The fire showed only embers. The night was very dark, and very still. Even the frogs had gone quiet; there was no sound of any living thing.

Then eventually, slowly, finally: “Holy shit.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck me inside out.”

“You were warned.”

“Does that mean—? Wait, or did we—? Huh. I can’t make that into anything that even looks like sense.” Every way he tried to think about it only spun the whirl inside his head faster and higher. “Son of a bitch.”

He looked up and found a sliver of moon creeping over the canyon’s rim. “I just don’t fucking know anymore.”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Except me. And I don’t know everything. Only what I remember.”

“But I knew about her. Somehow I knew. I didn’t remember her. Still don’t. But I knew.”

“There are ways in which you are very like a mortal man,” she said. “There are ways in which you are more like something else.”

His head jerked up. “I’m not mortal?”

“I don’t know. I’d rather not test it,” she said. “Now you understand why I worried for you.”

“No shit. So when we first met, and I said I didn’t know why I was even talking to you, you said—”

“ ‘I could tell you.’ ” She sounded like she might be smiling, just a bit, as she quoted herself. “ ‘But you wouldn’t believe me.’ ”

“That. Yeah. This was what you were talking about.”

“Some of it.”

“I was drawn to you because of what happened between … that guy who looked like me, and the slave woman.”

“You’re drawn to me because you need forgiveness and permission. And, I think, a girlfriend. The other?” A shrug in her voice. “There was a stable fire in your Faltane County War, but no horses died. Why?”

“How do you—yeah, never mind. Dumbass question. The manor stables were empty—I had Tanner drive the horses off just before …”

“
You
had,” she said. “You decided to empty the stables. Why?”

“Well … I mean, y’know, to deny remounts to Faltane’s cavalry, obviously.”

“Which the stable fire would have accomplished. Obviously.”

“Well, yeah, but after meeting you, I wasn’t about to … oh. Holy shit.”

“Again: yes.”

“It’s making me dizzy. Does this ever get less fucked-up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you doing this? Making this happen?” He shook his head, helpless in the whirl. “Am I?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Do you know anything more? Anything at all that might help us make sense of all this shit?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know you’ll smell better after you take that bath.”

The moon hung silver on the riverbanks and splashed the water with platinum sparks. The water was lazy, too slow to be cold, and the scent of flowers upstream reminded him of something. A dream he’d had, maybe. Or maybe he had been here before.

He’d scrubbed out his clothes and boots with sand from a small bar a few yards out. Now they hung on a twisted dwarf cedar just back from the water’s edge, and he went back out for more sand to scrub himself down. The water was deeper just beyond the bar, and after scraping off his top couple layers of grime, he anchored himself with one hand and let himself float.

The canyon, the river, the moon. Calm. Clean. All of it.

In this place, it was hard to imagine a world where the slave woman’s life and death could happen. But it did. Every day. In every land. The slave’s life, and worse. Girls suffered. Boys suffered. Women and men. At least she had the horses, at the end. That was a lot more than a lot of people ever get.

He thought then that he finally understood what Ma’elKoth had been about all along. How can you know such things and not want to make the world better? Shit, if
he
were God, he’d have burned this motherfucker down a long time ago.

And started over with people who don’t do that shit.

“You’re sad now,” she said from somewhere not far away.

“I guess.”

“Do you remember ordering me to not be sad for you?”

He felt himself smile. “Sometimes I talk faster than I think.”

“Not anymore.”

“That’s a nice thing to say.”

“It’s also true.”

“Well, thanks.”

“You wondered once why there should be such a creature as a horse-witch. The only answer I have is the answer I am. I only know I’m grateful for it.”

“Me too,” he said to the stars. “The world would be a better place with more of you and less of everything else.”

“And thanks in return.”

Then for a while there was only the night and the water, until she said, “I still like you.”

Something inside him stirred, rousing from a decade’s hibernation, and it woke up hungry. But the darkness inside him wouldn’t let it out. “I don’t see how you can like anybody, much less a man. Much less me. After everything that happened—”

“It didn’t happen to me,” she said. “It happened to the slave woman. I am not her. I look like her because her human friend looked like you.”

“But—”

“She was a slave. I can’t be caught, much less chained. She was alone. I have friends without number. She was damaged; every part of her that wasn’t scar was open wound. If I live a million million years, I will never take another mark upon my flesh. She lived in fear. I barely recall such a feeling. She was killed, and she died. I am killed, and I live. For a man, she had Dominic Shade a few days. For a man, I have you forever.”

“Forever,” he echoed, because he discovered he liked the sound of the word. “It’s like we—wait. Dominic … 
Shade
? What the hell?”

“That’s the name her friend gave to her. It’s how he was called by the mercenaries, and the Faltane’s men.”

“Nobody’s called me Dominic in thirty years,” he said slowly. “And I haven’t used
Shade
since I left Kirisch-Nar. Why the hell would I go by that?”

“You didn’t. He did.”

“Still,” he said. “I wonder. Dominic Shade instead of Jonathan Fist.”

“Maybe he hadn’t yet made the bargain you can’t get out of.”

He sat upright in the river. “Holy shit.”

He turned to look at her. She was on the riverbank. Her clothes were somewhere else. The moon on her skin was the most dazzling vision ever
to grace his eye. He tried to say
holy shit
again, but the sight of her had left him no breath with which to speak.

“I told you I still like you,” she said. “And I know you still like me.”

“You do?”

She pointed. “Looks like you like me a
lot
.”

“Uh …”

“Just say yes,” she said, “and we will make this happen.”

“That’s what I—I mean, he—said, when …”

“I warned you the story could take you somewhere you might not like.”

“No—that’s not … I mean, of course I—but I think I kind of need to …”

She folded her arms across her breasts in a way that somehow subtly altered the curve of her shoulder and hip from sublimely erotic to frankly pornographic.

“What you need is to make up your mind,” she said. “I’m immortal. You, on the other hand, aren’t getting any younger, tough guy.”

C
aine and Ma’elKoth converse softly, some distance away. Kris and Angvasse walk together idly among the trees. The horse-witch braids her garland, and Duncan finally gets it.

“Ah …” He sighs into the dappled green. “Ah, of course.”

He understands now, or thinks he does. Someone unhappened the slave woman, and now there is a horse-witch … which means she can be unhappened too.

He rolls his head to look up into the horse-witch’s face. “So it really is all about the girl.”

She holds her wildflower garland out, squinting critically. “Too much? Maybe more subtle in the shades of blue?”

“He’s done this—is doing this, is … rewriting the entire structure of reality—for
you
?”

She smiles past the flowers. “That’s very romantic.”

“Capital
R
as well.”

“He doesn’t believe in happy endings.”

Duncan nods. “He has reason.”

“He’s not doing this for me. He’s doing it for love.”

“He loves
you
. I see it every time he even thinks about you.”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t need defending. I need nothing. We have an uncomplicated relationship.”

“Compared to his others, I daresay it is.”

“This may be difficult for you to understand, because it’s not easily expressed in the words you and your son still need. You could say that he’s doing it for Love in the abstract sense—for the right to love, and the chance to be loved. Not for himself. For everyone. He would deny this, angrily, because he thinks the abstract is where good things turn bad, and he may be right. That is a matter too deep for me. I can tell you that there is nothing abstract in his love; his love is specific, and concrete. Love is his law. His only law.”

She smiles at Duncan, and hangs the garland of wildflowers from the guard of the Sword. “I think he gets that from you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Duncan. I don’t know you well, but him I know
very
well. I’ve known him a lot longer than you have. When he thinks of love, he thinks of you. You’re the example he’s trying to live up to.”

“That’s …” He shakes his head. “I know better than to argue with you, but I want to. I want to deny it. I wish I could make
that
unhappen. He deserves better.”

“If you mean by
deserve
what I think you mean, everyone does.”

“I was a
terrible
example. Of practically everything.”

“You were what you were. Now you can be what you are. You did what you did. Now you can do what you do.”

“I don’t understand.”

She nodded, and for a moment her brows drew together in thought. At length she said, “I don’t love horses.”

“You don’t?”

“Of course not. Horses are large smelly dim-witted creatures who serve no higher purpose than processing grass into shit.”

“Then—”

“But there is a one-eyed mare, with a white scar just here, for whom I would give all my lives if it might keep her happy forever. Your son’s horse, the one he calls Carillon, is so bright and playful that I start to laugh when I first smell his approach. There’s a medicine-hat paint, who has a cast in one eye—sometimes I look at her and think I’m seeing myself. One old gelding, who used to be black, follows her around like a body servant, because she won’t let the younger geldings and stallions pick on him.”

“You don’t love horses. You love each horse,” Duncan says slowly, with a distantly thoughtful nod. “Personally.”

“He doesn’t love people. He doesn’t even
like
people. He dislikes everyone he meets, on principle, because it gives him an excuse to be an asshole. But he loves you. He loves me. He loves Kris, and Deliann. Angvasse. Even Pallas Ril. Ma’elKoth. Personally.”

“Yes.”

“He loves the slave woman in Faltane most of all.”

Duncan frowns. “A woman he never met? One who never really existed …?”

“I told you,” she says lightly, “some things he loves are more unlikely than you.”

“Still.”

“He grieves for her. Not for her death. For her life. He grieved for her before he had any idea there was such a person. He grieves for everyone like her. For everyone like you.”

“Me?”

“What hurts him most is imagining how she begged and prayed and pleaded for mercy, and mercy never came. She screamed and no one listened. She bled and no one cared. He would have helped her. He wanted to help her. His heart is still broken because he didn’t. He’ll never get over it.”