“The dragons came from the north. They looked like giant flying snakes with short legs, and talons like eagles. Their wings were as wide as their bodies were long. They were beautiful, but we’d already fought our way through shadow creatures that burned, horse people who used human skin as clothing, and giant humanoids who destroyed everything they saw. We were cautious.”
Sylph. Centaurs. Trolls. I’d be cautious after that, too.
“Stef and I watched them coming. The way they moved through the sky was hypnotic, and we’d never seen something so large that could fly. But then one darted toward us, and I was the slowest to run away.” His voice snagged on memory. “There was green slime everywhere around me, and on me. Acid. It burned and itched, and then I saw bone.”
I shuddered. That was the first time a dragon had killed him.
“When I was reborn, it was in Heart. It seemed like the dragons had been guarding it from us, or trying to destroy it.” He still had that faraway expression, like he was seeing five thousand years past. “They attacked in the same way every time, one always straight for the temple as if to rip it from the ground. They were always unsuccessful, but it never stopped them.
“Fifteen more times in my early lives. Acid, teeth, or just getting knocked off a wall.” He sighed. “No one else had luck so terrible. I thought they were after me in particular.”
I twisted and touched his cheek, drawing patterns across his skin. It was dry now, sweat all evaporated.
“I’m old, Ana.” He said it like that would change anything. I already knew this was only one incarnation of the musician I’d always admired. He closed his fingers around my wrist, gently. “I’ve died so many times. It always hurts.”
I paused with my fingers resting on the tip of his chin. “Always?”
“Some worse than others. The easy ones are when you die of poison or illness. Sometimes you get to go from old age.”
The room turned into winter. “What does it feel like?”
“Dear Janan. You shouldn’t ask that.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be willing to tell you.”
Someday I would die too. I might as well be prepared.
“It feels like being ripped out of yourself. Like being caught in giant talons or fire or jaws. It’s suffocating. And then there’s nothing for what seems like eons, but when you come back just as painfully, it’s only been years. Any time you’re killed—sylph, dragon, giant, anything violent—the pain lasts even after your soul is out. Something incorporeal shouldn’t be able to hurt so much.” He hesitated, and his voice turned gentle. “I’ve been burned by a sylph too. It never feels quite right again. Sometimes, even generations later, I can still feel the fire.”
I held my fists to my chest.
“That’s why everyone focuses on the present and future. The past is too painful when you remember how lives end. Often abruptly.” He shook his head. “In a dragon attack four generations ago, Stef had to save my hat for me to bury. It had been thrown aside, and was the only thing left.”
I couldn’t imagine living, or dying, like that. For millennia. And then I’d come along, always asking about things that had happened before me. I hadn’t meant my curiosity to cause so much pain.
Before I could find an apology good enough, he said, “I think last week wouldn’t have been so dramatic if I hadn’t already been killed by dragons not twenty years ago.”
That was before I’d been born, but it probably felt recent to him. “What happened?”
He stilled, arms loosening around me. “I went north because I was lonely. I felt empty, and I needed inspiration. Stef, who’d just reached her first quindec, told me not to go because I was too old, but I didn’t have a reason to wait. Ciana had died a few years prior.”
I nodded; Li had said Sam and Ciana had been close.
“After traveling for weeks,” he murmured, sounding far away now, “I came upon a white wall that must have gone up a mile . . .” He trailed off.
“Was it like Heart’s?”
He blinked. “What?”
“The wall. Did it have a pulse like the one around Heart?”
“I—” He looked as confused as the day I’d asked how he knew the doorless temple was empty. “Dragons came from all around. Before I could do anything, they’d killed me.”
“What about the wall?”
“What wall?” He inhaled deeply, shook back into himself, and kissed my temple. “You’re trying to distract me. Good job.”
My skin tingled where his mouth had touched. “But— Never mind.” Maybe the wall was a question for later. I could look it up in the library.
“I think we should see how much time is left for your lessons.”
“Are you sure you’re up for it?” I scrambled off his lap and onto my feet. As much as I’d liked being that close, it wasn’t fair that he could keep kissing my head when I wasn’t sure if that was something we were doing now. Library time, lunch, head kissing. Today was probably a trauma exception, but still.
He took my hands when I offered to help him up, but he didn’t let me hold any of his weight. “Music lessons would restore some much-needed normalcy, and I’d like to hear what you were playing.”
I shifted and shrugged. “I don’t want you to . . . you know.” My insides flip-flopped. It had been easier to play when he wasn’t there.
“I’ll be fine.” He brushed his knuckles across my cheek.
I ignored his touch and headed for the door, forcing my tone light. “Okay, then. But no laughing. I don’t have a million years of practice composing in my head.”
He scoffed. “I’m not that old.”
“And the piano wasn’t even invented yet. Yeah, I know. Sing another tune, Sam.” I strained a smile. He wanted normalcy? Fine.
He feigned shock as he followed me into the hall. There he reclaimed my hand and stopped, spinning me toward him as though we were dancing. “I just thought of a name for your waltz.”
I waited.
“If you like it, that is. We can always change it.” His voice shook, probably because it had been such an awful morning, but I imagined he wanted my approval. “‘Ana Incarnate.’”
My heart felt too big for my ribs to cage.
For all the unfair head kissing, the way we hadn’t kissed in the kitchen, and his grudging agreement to dance with me every morning—it suddenly seemed he knew me better than anyone in the world. Better than anyone ever would.
He’d seen my deepest need, buried so far I’d hardly been aware of it.
There was no telling if I’d be reborn when I died, but the waltz began and ended with my four notes. He’d built the music around things that reminded him of me. And now this name. My name.
A hundred or a thousand years after I died, someone could play my waltz, even Li, who’d always resented my presence, and they would remember me.
Thanks to Sam, I was immortal.
Chapter 19
Knife
TRUE TO HIS threat of having the rest of today be normal, we made our way downstairs, no time for me to bask in the revelation of my immortality. Still, I felt I glowed a little as I approached the piano.
Maybe the worst was over. Maybe we really could get back to normal, which meant I needed to tell him about the footsteps, but I squashed that impulse for now. He did need to know someone had followed me, but I could tell him later, when we hadn’t just discussed his many deaths, and when he hadn’t just immortalized me through his music.
I took my place at the piano, not entirely comfortable with the way he looked over my shoulder.
“Warm up again.”
I knew better than to argue, just donned my fingerless mitts. Scales and arpeggios flew from under my fingers while Sam perched on a stool nearby, looking thoughtful. “What?” I asked.
He shook his head, as if knocked from a trance, and reached for a notebook and pencil. “Play what you wrote.”
“Are you sure?”
“If anything happens, you’re right here to rescue me.” He flashed a smile, and for the next two hours I played and struggled to translate it to paper while he took notes and hmmed at me.
“This is much harder than I thought it would be,” I said when we took a break for lunch. “It’s not even a complicated song.”
“I think you’ll find that the simple things are often the most challenging. Everything shows in them. Everything matters.” He slid his notebook across the table and raised his eyebrows. “Another hour of practice before we head to the library?”
That was a good sign. All last week, he’d practically ripped me from the piano so he could get back to his research, though he never said what he wanted to know so badly. As anxious as I was to find out what else Menehem had written in his diaries, I was happier Sam was behaving more like himself. Learning about my father had waited eighteen years. It could wait another hour.
“That sounds perfect.” I leaned over to see what his notebook held. Scribbles and musical notes stared up at me. “What’s this?”
“Some things we might discuss about your music.”
I slumped. “It was awful, wasn’t it?” He’d let me work on it for hours before telling me? I couldn’t decide whether to be angry or devastated.
I wanted to run upstairs and hide my shame, but that wouldn’t help me improve. Instead, I grabbed the notebook and started toward the parlor. Might as well get it over with.
“Actually, I thought it was pretty.” He touched my elbow. “Did you even read what I wrote? Or did you just assume?”
“What do you think?” I pressed the notebook against his chest. “You didn’t say anything about it, and I just started. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but this page is filled. I think the next one is too.”
He gave me an exhausted look as his hands closed over the notebook. “Nothing is perfect, not even when you’ve been playing for several lifetimes.” Without waiting for me, he marched back into the parlor and set the notebook on his stool. “I know you think either you’re amazing the first time, or you’re a failure, but that’s not how this is. Nothing is like that. Yes, there’s room to improve this piece, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Remember? You just started. And you didn’t bother to notice I wrote things like, ‘This is lovely.’”
I searched for an insult strong enough to hurt him, but gentle enough so he wouldn’t decide he didn’t like me anymore. Nothing. I hated this, not being good enough, being lifetimes behind everyone else. My jaw hurt from clenching it.
“Fine.” I sat on the piano bench again, determined to do better. Even my scales sounded angry.
Sam slipped onto the bench next to me, interrupting a major scale. His hands covered mine.
“Music is the only thing that ever mattered to me,” I whispered to the ringing silence. “Every time I hurt, I had one place to turn. I need to be good at it.”
“You are. I don’t, and probably won’t, tell you enough. Can’t have my students getting cocky.” He smiled; I didn’t. “But you are good at this. I’ve never enjoyed teaching someone as much.” He curled his fingers with mine and leaned toward me. Our thighs pressed together and his voice deepened. “I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.” All this touching today. It was disorienting and distracting, because he’d mostly been so careful to keep his distance. What if he did the same thing he had in the kitchen our first day here?
I couldn’t let him hurt me—even unintentionally—because he’d had a tough morning. I had, too.
“Wait,” I said when he started to speak. “Not right now. It’s just too much. I’m sorry.”