As she lay on the broad tall bed in the arms of the sleeping Conor Barr, her face was pale, despite her golden brown skin and the reflection from the dying fire. And she was cold all over, even under the gold satin coverlet. She didn’t bother pulling the covers up around her chin. She knew it was no use. The cold came from inside, not out.
“Anything can happen, Lily!” she had heard Conor exult, whispering in her ear before he slept. “Anything!” He was too excited. Pushed and pulled to and fro by forces he didn’t understand, inside of him and out, he no longer could see what was real.
“In my mind,” my father told me later, in that faintly wry tone he took when talking about his younger self, “it was all triumph. It was all ‘Conor, Conor, Conor.’ Whatever Conor wanted, Conor was going to get.” My father laughed again, that sad laugh of his. “Young men are such idiots,” he said, smiling. “We think it’s us against the world, and we never think the world is likely to win.”
I know he loved her truly, though. Even though he had waited till his new bride slept before slipping through the corridors to her room. Even though he slept soundly now, as if she were a trophy, or a prize, anything but a human being, and never worried now about what would happen to her or me, the child she still hadn’t told him was going to be born, even though he smiled in his sleep at dreams of having everything he wanted and his own way, and having everyone admire him while he did, supporting him in his triumph, and never doubting for a moment that he deserved it. Still, I know he loved her truly. Didn’t he prove it, much, much later, when he was a much, much older man?
And she? She had that great capacity for Love, Love of all kinds, as I should know. He was her first great Love, and the last she would ever have of that kind. But she knew Reality, because she was a girl who knew she was a woman, not a boy thinking he was a man. Reality told her she could not stay.
“Come with me, Conor,” she’d pleaded before he had fallen, in her arms, asleep. But he, just as Livia had known he would, only laughed. “Go with her?” my father said to me later. “Leave all that advantage? Go to some provincial place where I’d be unknown and poor, when all we had to do was stay put to have everything our hearts desired? I didn’t think she was serious. I told her, ‘You’re the one I love. What does it matter what everyone else thinks? We can arrange it to suit ourselves.’ But she wouldn’t listen, of course. Well, of course she wouldn’t. Wasn’t she a person in her own right? Not that I knew that then.”
That was something she realized, I think. That she wasn’t a person to Conor, no matter how much he loved her. She was an object, a thing. And this was not how she loved him. She saw that to him her child would be an object, a thing. And she had the Key. She knew this had to change. She knew that because she had walked on the Road of the Dead.
As she lay there staring at the dying fire, it was as if a pearl dropped from her heart down and down and down. She listened carefully. But though it dropped for a very long time, it never reached the bottom. That night, she failed to hear it land.
Then there was another sound she missed tonight: the sound of Rex breathing evenly, on the rug beside the hearth. Lily listened and listened, and scrunched her eyes up with the effort of listening, but you can’t hear what’s not there, no matter how hard you try.
Shuddering, she buried her head in Conor’s chest. He murmured in his sleep, and pulled her to him. There was warmth in his arms, but even as she held them to her, and clasped her own around his chest, she could feel the warmth dying. There was soon to be no more warmth for her there, no matter how much she desired it. Because Lily knew that her desires were not the most important thing in the world. She had drawn this knowledge up with the Key from the Mermaids’ Well. This is an important knowledge, maybe the most important knowledge for a queen. My father had not achieved it yet. It would be a long time before he did.
Pulling gently on Conor’s arms, she prized them apart. She sat up in the bed, paler, even, than before, watching silently as Conor Barr slept. He had one hand lying palm up on his forehead, and that forehead wrinkled as if, even in his sleep, he planned the grandest of plans. (“And I did,” my father said, smiling. “It’s true. Especially in my sleep, I was a Conqueror of Worlds.”) He muttered something, as if momentarily distressed, and she moved without thought to comfort him. But a sound behind startled her and checked her hand.
Lily saw it was Death, standing inside the huge carved door, wrapped in a heavy cloak against the cold, though Death can’t feel cold, no, or warmth either.
Quicker than her thoughts, Lily covered Conor with one arm, guarding him against Death. She was quick, my mother, when it came to protecting those she loved. I have reason to remember that.
This time, though, Death just laughed at her, indulgently. “No,” she said, throwing back the hood of her cloak, and heading toward the fire. “I haven’t come for Conor Barr, Lily. I have bigger fish to fry.”
But Lily warily kept her arm across my father’s sleeping chest. She watched Death as she sat at a loom that appeared there, where Rex had once slept. Death worked the loom, watching it critically as she did, its shuttle clattering with a comfortable familiarity.
It was a strange thing. But with Death’s arrival, warmth returned to Lily’s arms. She puzzled over this, and I’m not sure she ever understood it. I’m not sure I understand it, even now.
LILY COVERED CONOR WITH ONE ARM,
GUARDING HIM AGAINST DEATH
“If you go now, Lily,” Death said quietly, over her work. “I’ll leave him be for many, many years. As you know, I always keep my promises.”
Then Lily knew what she had to do—the way an animal does, without thinking. Lily gave Conor’s lips one quick kiss (“I felt it in my sleep, Sophy, I’m sure of it,” he said), then slid down to the floor, and began to dress. This was still her room, and all the clothes he had given her were there. She dressed in the warm clothes he had meant for her to wear when they went into the mountains for the winter sports—sheepskin-lined wide wool pants, a linen shirt that buttoned up high on the neck over a winter vest, and a pair of stout green leather boots. She looked at her velvet and fur cloak fit for a queen, and hesitated. Instead, driven by an instinct she did not yet wholly understand, she shrugged herself into a fur-lined leather hunting jacket of his, left carelessly over a chair. She felt carefully in the pockets for the scarf and gloves and hat that she knew he would keep there. And then, to her surprise, she felt the Key.
She hadn’t put it there. But the Key would not be left behind.
Death nodded her head and the shuttle flew across the warp. Lily came closer and saw the cloth stretched out on the loom. It was covered with pictures, top to bottom. People running up a dark street, an enormous wave following them. Two roads, the one to the left with a knight valiantly fighting a helmeted foe, the other solitary, weaving past streams and ponds, heading down to a green world.
As Death wove, Lily saw a picture emerge: a knight battling with his foe—only now the foe’s helmet was off, and you could see…the knight was battling himself.
“They’ve invited me here,” Death said, smiling wryly. “By the grandeur of their conceptions.” She stopped her work and sighed. “Oh, if they only knew how tired I am of man’s grand conceptions!”
And Lily’s hand tightened over the Key.
All at once, she could hear shouting, and the sound of thousands of feet tramping, and the loud roar of the sea. She could feel terror all around her, and the deep desire to get to higher ground.
“That’s right,” Death murmured approvingly. “That’s a good girl.” And this was the last time Lily was called a girl, when she was called one by Death. And there was no going back.
Now there was a little scratch at the door, as if from an animal, and when Lily opened it, Kim, wrapped in a blanket coat that was way too big for her, looked back at her with an expression of timid resolve.
“Ohhh,” Kim breathed, taking in Lily’s dress, as Lily quickly and silently shut the door behind them, so the two women were alone in the hall. “I knew it. I knew you were going.” Lily turned to go down the hall, putting her finger to her lips. “Well,” Kim whispered fiercely, “you’re not going without me, then, you know that, don’t you.” Lily, grinning, gave her a quick hug, and the two disappeared down the back staircase, and let themselves silently out onto the street. Neither of them looked back.