2.23. Your Lovely Brains

”Knew I shoulda locked the door.” Annalise slipped a black ribbon bookmark into place on her novel. “A thief’s gotten in.” She set the tome aside as Seth padded into her bedroom.

Our bedroom. Seth took it in. The vast four-poster with its carved botanicals flowering out of the footboard. The elegant, spindly nightstand with its pullchained flylamp in brass. The ornate burgundy armoire. The arched, tripart windows, looking ripped from antiquity with their elegant iron crossbars intact. The patterned chest at the bed’s foot with a family of horses in wooden relief across it, a stallion and a mare and their foals. Its lip was wedged partially open by something sheer and lacy.

“That’s my little lingerie yoke.” Annalise was following his attention. “Had to dig it out and blow the bleeding dust off it when you came in. It’s where I keep my frilly bits.”

He looked her up and down. “Not all your frilly bits.”

She grinned and rolled onto her side, propping her head up with her fist, to give him a better look at the robe she wore open over her bare body, its belt loose at her belly. Its ethereal drape was threaded through with swirling knotwork, and gauzy enough, in contrast with the starkly milk-white beauty it sheathed, to show Seth everything waiting for him atop that beautiful black bed. The gentle crease her hip made with her waist. The tattoos all along her. The soft, inviting darkness at the peaks of her breasts and in the trim triangle of her pubic hair.

The display was enough to put a man on his deathbed. The little pair of round reading glasses perched adorably over her large, soulful eyes were surely sufficient to finish him.

Seth knelt onto the bed and thought this must be how it felt when a faithful man stepped into the vast and echoing sacredness of a basilica.

“What’re you reading?” he asked.

“Some old yoke I borrowed from Feeli before she got a chance to rip it up. Not bad. A lot of words about rivers.”

“Oh, nice.” Seth gestured to another of Annalise’s omnipresent bookshelves. “Is it interesting? Cause I could find one of my own, if you…”

“Now, Seth.” She gave him a prim look as she removed her glasses. “You reckon I put on a see-through robe to read a book?”

“Maybe it’s a particularly steamy one.”

She laughed, sat up, and tossed her book over the edge of the bed. She patted her lap. “C’mere, petal.”

Seth scooted further onto Annalise’s big, elegant bed. It was different than the other fancy beds he’d slept upon back in Fontana. Those had been soft and sinking. Annalise’s bed was comfortable and luxurious, but far less plush, with a solid hook-and-pin joint frame beneath the mattress, and heavy wooden side rails. A life spent in tents and carriages developed a preference for firm bunking, he supposed. He lay his head in the heat of her lap and gratefully shut his eyes, the better to focus on the thick, callused, deceptively nimble fingers that scritched into his hair.

“So, tomorrow,” she said.

He opened an eye. “I understand there’s to be a parade.”

“There is, at that. Our parade. And after, we’ll have some grand craic up at the Sorcerer General’s Bastion.”

“Will I meet him?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. This close to the Winter War…” Annalise’s honeyed breath tickled the long hair at his ear. “It’s hard, y’know. The pressure on the deathspell. He has to push. Once the first legions roll out and start to thin the hordes, it’ll unscrew the vise a couple turns. We’re sure to see him then.”

“I’ve seen him already,” Seth said. “Many times.” And he had. A horde of Charles il Nekropoli IVs, in fact, or perhaps a hoard, aquiline faces frowning up at him in cupronickel bas-relief from stolen purses and pouches. “Never in the flesh, I guess, but I’m not in any hurry.”

“Ah, you’ll love him,” Annalise said. “But I’m not, either. Gives me a chance to screw Lisa onto the old stump and get my glad-handing out of the way.”

“You’re switching, then?” Seth asked. Annalise chuckled and he worried he’d sounded overeager.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Her legs slid across one another beneath his head; a patch of cool skin found his cheek and began to warm itself with him. “When I’m in the Necropolis, for the ceremonial stuff, I’m Lisa as often as I can be. The other Verdugos and the brass, that’s how they know me best.”

“Odd to think about,” he said. “Not that she’s incomplete or anything, but if you only had to know one, Annalise seems like the fullest picture.”

“Lisa is the right kind of woman for navigating the Necropolis waters. They’ve got sea serpents. Annalise, she’s too nice. And too…” Annalise sought briefly for the right word. “Ah, sure, you know yourself. I don’t got much patience for salad forks and shaved fennel.”

“Whereas Lisa has more refined tastes?”

“Actually, it might’ve gone the opposite way.” Annalise’s chuckle reminded Seth of the bonfires her and her children built on warm roadside nights. “Lisa loves whatever as long as it’s expensive. Me, these days. I think I prefer my man’s cooking more’n anything else.”

“I’m letting all of this go to my head, just so you know.”

“Good,” she cooed. “I’m gonna wait till it swells and bursts, and then I’ll eat your lovely brains.”

“Gasp. Your evil plot revealed.”

“So usually I’d be Lisa all day,” she continued. “That way, I could enjoy the parades and the paradiddles and such, and smile through the speeches, and hold my own when the prettier Verdugos would come peck at me.” Prettier Verdugos than Annalise were a ridiculous myth, but Seth didn’t interrupt. “Then I came home and switched back.”

“Using your Darkness every day like that must’ve tired you out.”

“It helped me sleep,” she said. “I was glad for that. Didn’t sleep very well as Lisa, tell you the truth.”

“Was her donor an insomniac?”

“I don’t reckon it has much to do with the donor. It was the loneliness. Annalise is far better at being lonely. It kept Lisa up.”

Why? Seth had been wondering it ever since he’d seen Ofelia surrounded by giggling salon-goers. Why was a woman as lovely as Annalise alone for so long, even when wearing a head as uninhibited as Lisa? He wasn’t torn-up about the luck that had blown his raincloud over her dry spell. But he wasn’t gleeful about it, either, this long isolation in her rearview. In this, and in many other ways, Annalise deserved a happier history. “I don’t think you’ll be lonely anymore,” he said.

“Me neither,” she said. “I think I might enjoy being her for a while. A Lisa vacation. Give us the chance to get reacquainted.” Her fingers marched left-right-left across his chest. “But I need to warn you.”

He laughed with gentle patience. “You don’t always need to warn me, you know.”

“It’s just I can feel my Lisa bits kicking around up in there. The original woman, she was a… well, she was a criminal. The way she was around men, it was… aggressive, sometimes.”

“I’m a soldier now,” Seth said. “I can handle aggression.”

“Oh aye? Your warrior swordfight lessons paying off?”

“Still a total novice when it comes to the saber, I’m afraid,” Seth said. “But I am excellent at surrendering.”

“All I’m sayin’ is that if it gets too… uh… unseemly, you can always demand I switch back, and I will. I can be a gouger when I’m Lisa, sure, but you’ve already proven you can wrestle me back into Annalise.”

“Yeah.” He frowned at the memory’s intrusion into this similarly soft-skinned moment. “I didn’t much enjoy it.”

“Well, I won’t be a geebag about it this time. Swear to the Saints. Anyway, it’ll be fine. Just reassuring ya.”

“Consider me reassured,” he said, though the appropriate word was probably assured, sans the re. Whatever Lisa had in store for him, he was more than ready for. “So that’s tomorrow…” He nudged his head further into Annalise’s lap, until the sweet matronly swell of her lower stomach cradled his temple. “What about tonight?”

“Tonight.” She hummed in mock-contemplation. “Tonight, I think I’d like to fuck an outlaw.”

“Odd coincidence,” he said. “I was planning on confessing a crime or two.”

“And then we can deal out a hand or two of Knuckle Nine, so you can fuck me right back.”

“I’ll go easy on you.”

“No need for that, mie’Lynnokien.” She rolled over, and with a swift, sultry stretch of her thigh, he was pinned beneath her. Her graceful pectoral muscles lengthened as she trapped his wrists above his head. Her abdomen went firm and sinewy as her hips swiveled into his. Her heavy breasts settled on his collarbone.

“Cause I won’t,” she whispered.

Lisa al Ydris examined herself in a hand mirror that hung from the wrought-iron metacarpals of her osseous carriage. She pressed her thumb against her tongue and brought it up to the silver stripe in the curtain of her hair, swiping an errant gray into alignment. She needn’t have. At every inch, from her sleek, shiny boots to the oiled scabbard at her back to the fetching flop of her wide-brimmed saturno cap, she was a picture-perfect Legionnaire Superior, looking as though she’d strode out from the craquelure of a triumphal military propagandist painting, spurs jangling. Those cavalier boots were heeled, which had taken her height from statuesque to demigoddess.

“So what’s the word, young man?” she asked. “When will we be cleared to cross?”

Seth blinked himself further awake and yawned into the still, straw-scented air of the Legion carriage house. It carried an echo through the cavernous, sparsely-furnished space; there were many dozens of berths, and only two of them filled.

He didn’t begrudge anyone for not showing up; it turned out the call time for a parade was six in the saintfucking morning. He’d awakened alone to the strident knock of Ydalf the butler on his door. By the time he’d made it to the carriage house, Lisa was already Lisa and the twins were in a startling amount of brocade and embroidered broadcloth. All three were in the black-and-green finery of the Legion, dialed as far as it would go.

“Within the hour, Madam Verdugo.” The legionnaire by the exit, a fresh-faced Primary, to judge by the sable fur fringe on his black trench coat, raised the grilled. skywire vox in his hand. “Just waiting on your fellow Verdugos—two more of them today—and clearance from central that there’s no latebreakers.”

Atop the carriage’s rear boot, Ofelia straightened the high collar on her Legion longcoat. Seth had never seen her in a uniform with this much finery. He supposed she had to be a Teniyant at the very least, but it was odd to think of the girl as an officer. She wore her collar perked high, around her ears, in the style of an artillerist; he suspected her salon had inflicted a hickey or two on her pale neck. “They’ve not got tired of this bit yet,” she sighed. “I suppose after hexis, pomp is the second-most renewable resource of the Legion.”

“It’d be worse if we weren’t early in the year.” Tiago took his bicorne off to scratch the top of his head. “One year we didn’t make it back until Fenkirk fifth and there were sixty damn carriages in one day. Took hours.”

“So everyone gets the grand entrance?” Seth asked.

Tiago nodded and replaced his bicorne. “Everyone who made quota.”

Seth was bareheaded and underdressed, compared to his compatriots; only the plain black tunic of the Legion and a jade infantryman’s sash around his waist, though both were crisp and new. “And what do I have to do to get a hat like yours?”

“I’d offer it to you,” Tiago said, “if I wasn’t convinced you’d steal the jade out of the brooch.”

“Whose ride is that, then?” Lisa swayed in that smooth Lisa way to the next Verdugo carriage over—an imposingly polished and plumed beast of a vehicle, its buckskin drays’ manes neatly pulled. She knocked on its window. “Anyone home? You’ve a lovely pair of animals.”

“That would be Larson a’Lauvey’s conveyance, Madam Verdugo.” The Primary piped up. “He and his retinue will be along shortly.”

“a’Lauvey, hmm?” Lisa cocked her head. “He’s new, right?”

“Quite new,” Ofelia said. “He’s still lit, if memory serves.”

“This marks his third season, Madam Verdugo,” the Primary supplied.

Lisa whistled. “Well, now. Good for Larson. What was his quota, if you mind?”

“The full fifty, Madam Verdugo.”

“Fifty already, in his third year? Saints and seraphs, the poor thing.” Lisa knelt to examine a’Lauvey’s wagon further, as though the ghost of his harried journey might make itself evident in his wheels. “Well, if he’s back before the end of Drozt, he’s clearly got the feel for it.”

A whistle from the wide double-doors of their shaded carriage house. A third Verdugo’s retinue had arrived, drawn by two thunderhooved dun destroyers, in a goliath of a carriage, the dimensions of which intruded at the bottom edge of land schooner territory.

The Primary trotted to Lisa’s side with puppydog eagerness to be helpful. “And that’s—”

“You needn’t tell me whose carriage that is, young man.” Lisa’s elegant fairytale-princess eyes narrowed; a heavy thunderhead passed in front of her radiant disposition and struck a frown across her face. “I know exactly whose carriage that is.”