He stared at me for a long moment, his face so frozen and masklike it was as if he had been struck across the cheeks.
“You’d be asking me to murder a Line.”
“No,” I said patiently. “The Line is gone, and you’ve already honoured us. All I’m asking for is one last kindness, Campion. This wasn’t ever the way it was meant to be.” I reached for him then, settling my hand on his wrist, and then sliding my fingers down until I held his in my own. “You think you lack the courage to commit grand acts. I don’t believe a word of it. And even if you did, here’s your chance to do something about it. To be courageous and wise and selfless. We’re dead. We’ve been dead for a million years. Now let us sleep.”
“Shaula...” he began.
“You’ll consider it,” I said. “You’ll evaluate the options, weigh the risks and the capacity for failure. And you’ll reach a conclusion, and set yourself on one course or another. But we’ll speak no more of it. If you mean to end us, you’ll wait until the end of the Thousandth Night, but you’ll give me no word of a clue.”
“I’m not very good at keeping secrets.”
“You won’t need to. This is my threading, Campion. My night of nights. It means I have special dispensation to adjust and suppress my own memories, so that my strand has the optimum artistic impact. And I still have the chance to undo some memories, including this entire conversation. I won’t remember the phantoms, or the Belladonna Protocol, or what I’ve just asked of you.”
“My Line frowned on that kind of thing.”
“But you got away with it, all the same. It’s a small deletion, hardly worth worrying about. No one will ever notice.”
“But I’d know we’d had this conversation. And I’d still be thinking of what you’d asked of me.”
“That’s true. And unless I’ve judged you very wrongly, you’ll keep that knowledge to yourself. We’ll have many more conversations between now and Thousandth Night, I’m sure. But no matter how much I press you—and I will, because there’ll be something in your eyes as well—you’ll keep to your word. If I ask you about the flowers, or the other guests, or any part of this, you’ll look at me blankly and that will be an end to it. Sooner or later I’ll convince myself you really are as shallow as you pretend.”
Campion’s expression tightened. “I’ll do my best. Are you sure there’s no other way?”
“There isn’t. And you know it as well. I think you’ll honour my wish, when you’ve thought it over.” Then I made to turn from him. “I’m going back to the Owlhead tower to undo this memory. Give me a little while, then call me back to the Clockhead. We’ll speak, and I’ll be a little foggy, and I’ll probably ask you odd questions. But you’ll deflect them gently, and after a while you’ll tell me it’s time to go to the threading. And we’ll walk down the stairs as if nothing had changed.”
“But everything will have,” Campion said.
“You’ll know it. I won’t. All you’ll have to do is play the dashing consort. Smile and dance and say sweet things and congratulate me on the brilliance of my circuit. I think you can rise to the challenge, can’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
I left him and returned to my parlour.
LATER WE DANCED on the Fiddlehead rock. I had the sense that some unpleasantness had happened earlier between us, some passing cloudy thing that I could not bring to mind, but it could not have been too serious because Campion was the perfect companion, attentive and courteous and generous with wit and praise and warmth. It thrilled me that I had finally broken the silence between us; thrilled me still further that the Thousand Nights had so far to run—the iron hands of the Clockhead tower still to complete their sweep of their face.
I thought of all the evenings stretching ahead of us, all the bright strands we had still to dream, all the marvels and adventures yet to play out, and I thought of how wonderful it was to be alive, to be a thing with a mind and a memory and the five human senses to drink it all in.