Page 84 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘I’ve shattered,’ she said. ‘And I’m better this way. I have sharp edges now. You can’t pick me up without getting cut.’
The waiter came in with the next dish: turtle soup, the liquid deep red with tomato and spices, chunks of pale meat sliced thin yet still gilded with fat. Rosamund ate slowly, closing her lips around the spoon with a languidness so obscene that Miriam laughed outright.
After the soup, the fish course was a red snapper smothered in hollandaise, its enormous golden eye clouded by death. Then the entrée: a whole roast pigeon stuffed with foie gras and truffle, laid on a bed of chestnuts and drizzled with cognac sauce.
Rosamund took a bite of the pigeon. It was exceptionally rich, coating her tongue with salt and oil and the earthy scent of the truffles. She wondered at how, in every lifetime, she had been so exceptionally privileged—maybe if she’d made more of an effort to help people below her station, the world might’ve been less cruel to her. But it was too late for such thoughts now. She was eating truffles, wearing diamonds, and preparing to die.
‘Do you miss your past lives?’ Miriam asked her.
‘Do you?’
Miriam drummed her fingers on the table. Shadows spurted violently beneath them, as if the tablecloth had open veins.
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Will you missme—Rosamund—whenI’mgone?’
Her lips twitched. In amusement? Regret? ‘Yes. I believe so.’
‘But it is a sacrifice you’re willing to make,’ Rosamund replied, with false flippancy. ‘Like the pigeon on my plate—I might pity the creature, if I saw it living, but that wouldn’t stop me from having it for dinner.’
‘You don’t love the pigeon, Rosamund.’
‘As you love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s odd,’ Rosamund said darkly. ‘I think that somehow makes it worse.’
They remained in silence until dessert. It was devil’s food cake, to add insult to injury, served warm with a scattering of raspberries. This, Miriam ate, as if to spite her.
Rosamund hated sweet things; she didn’t even try the cake. She put her fork down with a clatter. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’
‘Yes?’
‘We both know howIwas created,’ Rosamund said. ‘That night on the balcony, with blood and fury. But what about you? Where doyoucome from?’
‘With blood and fury,’ Miriam echoed. ‘I was made before Cybil’s era. Centuries before, I think.’
‘Youthink?’
‘I don’t keep time like you do, darling. If I did, I would have driven myself to madness.’ Miriam took up her fork between finger and thumb, inspecting the tines in the light of the candle on the table; then she spoke to her reflection in the steel. ‘I was a shadow, once—as I am now—but the sort of shadow that is everywhere, the sort that depends on the light to cast it. Then a group of mages offered me unimaginable power—enough of each of their souls to make me something more. I found a new form. I was freed from the tyranny of the dark.’
‘So, you were created by a deal?’
Dark eyes; a darker smile. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know the particulars—I never will—but they wanted a servant to do their bidding. At the moment I was made, they had paid the price to bring me there, but not to bend me to their will. That was foolish of them. I killed them before they could tie me to their service.’
‘Youmurderedyour creators?’
Miriam grinned, dropping her fork with a clatter. ‘Does that upset you? If we owe our makers favours, Rosamund, then you owe me infinitely.’
Rosamund looked away. ‘I don’t think of you as my creator.’
‘Your destroyer, then.’
‘My reckoning.’
‘Are you afraid to die, Rosamund? To truly die, without resurrection?’
