"Ask your question," Cesaria said. "You have a question. Ask it."
"It sounds so childish."
"Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it."
"Am I… safe?"
"Safe?"
"Yes. Safe."
"In your flesh? No. I can't guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there's other hands to hold you. I've told you that already."
"And… I think I believe you," I said.
"So then," Cesaria said, "you have no reason not to let the memories come."
She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.
"Touch me," she said.
I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.
"Don't be afraid," she said to me. "They don't bite."
I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn't bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn't realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can't imagine how that's possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.
I don't believe I had ever stood so close to my father's wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush and forbidding. Strands of her hair were lifted by gusts off the blaze around us (to the heat of which I seemed invulnerable) and brushed against my cheek. Their touch, though it was light, was nevertheless profoundly sensual. Feeling it, and seeing her exquisite features, I could not help but imagine what it would be like to be received into her arms. To kiss her, to lie with her, to put a child into her. It was little wonder my father had obsessed on her to his dying day, though all manner of argument and disappointment had soured the love between them.
"So now…" she said.
"Yes?" I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.
"Take it back…" she said.
I didn't comprehend what she was telling me. "Take what back?" I said.
"The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back."
I understood. It was time to repossess all that I'd attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I'd hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.
"Take it back."
I wanted to beg a few moments' grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.
"Take it back," she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat and lungs in an instant.
My head reeled; white blotches burnt at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.
The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up-hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.
What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I'd first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father's wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.
All of the events that had just unfolded might have seemed a fiction but for one simple fact: I was still standing. Whatever force my mind had unleashed here, it had come with power enough to raise me up off the ground and set me on my feet. And there I stood, amazed; and of course certain I would fall down again at any moment. That moment passed, however; so did the next and the next and the next, and still I stood.
Tentatively I glanced back over my shoulder. There, not six yards from me, was the door through which I'd stepped all these visions ago. Beside it, overturned, lay my wheelchair. I fixed my gaze upon it. Dared I believe it was now redundant?
"Look at you…" said a slurred voice.
I glanced back from the wheelchair to the door, where Luman was now leaning. He'd found another source of liquor while I'd been occupied in the room. Not a bottle but a decanter. He had the glazed look of a well-soused man. "You're standing," he said. "When did you learn to do that?"
"I didn't…" I said. "I mean, I don't understand why I'm not falling down."
"Can you walk?"
"I don't know. I haven't tried."
"Well, Lordie, man. Try."
I looked down at my feet, which had not taken any instruction from me in a hundred and thirty years. "Go on then," I murmured.
And they moved. Not easily at first, but they moved. First the left, then the right, turning me around to face Luman and the door.
I didn't stop there. I kept moving, my breath quick and fast, my arms stretched before me to break my fall should my legs suddenly give out. But they didn't. Some miracle had occurred when Cesaria had raised me up. Her will, or mine, or both combined, had healed me. I could walk; stride. In time, I would run. I would go all the places I'd not seen in my years in the chair. Out into the swamp, and the roads beyond,- to the gardens beyond Luman's Smoke House; to my father's tomb in the empty stables.
But for now, I was happy to reach the door. So happy indeed that I embraced Luman. Tears were coming, and I could not have held them back if I'd cared to.
"Thank you," I said to him.
He was quite happy to accept my embrace. Indeed he returned it with equal fervor, burying his face in my neck. He too was sobbing, though I didn't quite know why. "I don't see what you have to thank me for," he said.
"For making me brave," I said. "For persuading me to go in."
"You don't regret it then?"
I laughed, and took his bleary face in my hands. "No, brother, I do not regret it. Not a moment."
"Were you nearly driven mad?"
"Nearly."
"And you cursed me?"
"Ripely."
"But it was worth the suffering?"
"Absolutely."
He paused, and considered his next question. "Does that mean we can sit down and drink till we puke, like brothers should?"