"You're just fucking with me." The cigarettes in J.D.'s coat had carried through to the Betwixt-and-Between. He lit one of the few he had left. His mom would've told him off for smoking and language. "You even smell like yourself." Underneath the oiled metal of her armor.
"I don't know you," the Paladin repeated gently. "I'm sorry." But she was serene and unconcerned; she held her sword on her lap, buffing it with a square stone block.
"A knight in shining armor now! It fits," J.D. said. "Your name was Deanna Rosen, and Granddad Dean fought on the wrong side in World War Two. You took care of a violent old man who called you every foul name under the sun because you thought no one deserves to die alone. I'm not like you. You did everything for other people, except when you walked into that building and left me behind. You knew exactly what you were doing. You waved from the window and he blew the place up."
"You suffer from that loss," the Paladin said, calm and neutral still as she sharpened her blade. "Anger and grief govern you."
"Of course I'm angry. You should have taken me with you," J.D. said. "If I'd known how it would be after you died, I'd have walked into that library with you in a heartbeat. It would have spared me a lot; it would have spared me - this. As soon as I saw Martha, I wondered about you. I came here to find you, and learned I mean nothing to you. But that was true all along. You didn't care enough to stay. You should have left me to sleep."
"It's dangerous to think that way," the Paladin said. "Look at your hand."
J.D. didn't want to obey her. He didn't care; he dragged at the cigarette again.
"Listen to me. The Fire Woman claims she owns you," the Paladin said sharply. "She marked you, and sold you to Grey Willows."
That idea of being owned, treated like property, angered J.D. enough to check. In the faint light of the cigarette, he could see the mark on his skin. It was a fire symbol, stamped on the back of his hand like a brand, the flames overlaid with a tuft of grey.
"Miss Chandler is the Fire Woman," he said. It felt like an unbearable heat prickled under his skin. "She said she bought me from Dad. But I was unconscious at the time; it's not like I agreed. You can't buy people." Yet in the real world many people had done and did exactly that, in both the past and the present. In a place like this, the powerful had an even wider range of options for treating those weaker than they like things.
"You must resist as you're doing now," the Paladin said. "The Fire Woman has come and gone here for a long while. She's powerful, and knows all too well how to stay within the rules of this place. She made a bargain. Grey Willows would consume all power and brightness in you and leave a desiccated shell behind."
Not like this knight in shining armor would care. She didn't even remember him. The Paladin seemed to sense his bleak mood.
"My calling is to the Attic Above," she said. "They're light, light like you have never known before. They are truth and purity and good and right. They know past, present, and future, and they act as a shining beacon.
"Let me tell you what the Attic warned me about you. You had to hide your weaknesses and they grew strange in the dark. Your despair festered as anger at the world, an anger turned outward as destruction. The Attic saw nothing but black in your fate lines, murder on a massive scale.
"Better that I should fight and kill you here than allow you to return, they said."
So this was why she had the naked sword on her lap. J.D. didn't move. If she was going to kill him, he'd let her. She had taken him from Grey Willows so his death served some greater good rather than the hunched grey creature, that was all.
"But I will not harm you," the Paladin said. "The Attic knows their untamed light is merciless. That is why they choose servants who know more of mortality, leaving judgment to those who still understand frailty and choice. I choose not to harm a child."
"Not such a child. I killed Ram Sweeney," J.D. said, daring the knight to go ahead. "You know I did it. You know I have power, and know exactly what I had to do to gain it."
"You started with a wish to defend others," the Paladin said. "It twisted into revenge. When you could have found a different way, you chose to kill. The life you took has left a stain on your soul. Try not to do the same again."
"I won't if I don't get out of here," J.D. said. "Have you told me this because you want me to kill myself? You and your Attic would be rid of a problem, and you'd have no blood on your own hands. I guess it would be as easy here as anywhere else to die."
That's good. Have you written a suicide note before? Veronica had said, talking over what had looked a hell of a lot like Chandler's dead body.
He hadn't answered her. Yeah. Death is the logical solution for a myriad of problems. It had crossed his mind before like an old friend.
"You might get your wish," the Paladin said, still speaking calmly and levelly. "At the end of the path, you can choose to return to your world. But you will only be able to make that choice if there is something you love enough to return to. If there is nothing you care for, you will never find your way back to your body. It will die, and your only choice then will be the void beyond this world."
J.D. bowed his head. This would be the ending, then. "Nobody loves me. You left me. My girlfriend broke up with me. Dad sold me. Anyone would be better than him, but he treated me like I'm nothing. I don't think a hamster's going to cut it as a reason to go back."
"Keep thinking," the Paladin said. "Perhaps you will change your mind. I might not remember you, but it's not as if I don't understand your feelings. I was lost and alone too when I came to this place."
"And now you're clearly not," J.D. pointed out. He wanted her to be happy - he wasn't quite selfish enough to wish her as miserable as him. He'd known all along his mother would have been better off if he had never existed, if she never met his father. It hurt that she had utterly forgotten him, that she looked on him as no more than an unpleasant stranger.
The Paladin nodded. "I changed. I used to look out into the world I left behind, watching its sea of troubles while I was helpless to aid anyone. I suppose I was trapped like that for years, watching only to torment myself that there was nothing I could do. Then I journeyed to find the Star and ask for a boon to relieve my endless misery. I asked for this. I sought the ability to help instead of watching and weeping; I asked to give myself to a noble cause. Now I help lost souls in this place and visit mortal dreams to fight nightmares.
"But to ask a favor in this world, you must give something of value in return. I traded my memories of my life before. If I really am your mother, then my memory of you must have been very important to me, once."
There was something like compassion in her eyes as she looked at him, but it was only the pity you would give a stranger. J.D. dropped his glance, staring at the brand on the back of his hand once more.
The Paladin raised her gaze to the horizon and then stood up. She sheathed her sword. Her horse reared expectantly. "The Thorn Lady rises," she said. "I ride to her to help your friends. You can choose to come or stay."
—
Heather Duke suddenly went blind. Two hands went over her face.
"Guess who?"
She whipped around, hoping against hope - surely she knew the voice, surely she wasn't wrong. "Veronica?"
She came. She promised she'd come for me, Heather thought. She tried valiantly to hide her surprise and relief, hide how desperate she'd felt. "How did you get up here?" she demanded. "There's no way out or in ... "
"When you've been lent a fox skin, it's easy to find secret passages," Veronica said. She gave Duke a feral, conspiratorial grin. Veronica's clothes were dirty and her hair wild, and she looked like she'd passed through much worse trouble than she was going to admit to, but she was powerful and unbroken and took the lead. "Let's get you out of those clothes."
Heather flushed. "Of course," she said haughtily. "I can't move in them, after all."
They looked down at the tournament, Veronica all but hidden behind Duke's dress. "They're fighting over you," Veronica said.
"It's not flattering. I'm just a toy," Duke said. "A prize. It's a Remington party writ large. Not my style."
The tournament proceeded apace outside the tower. Veronica glanced contemptuously at the dirty men trying to bash each other over the head in various uncreative ways. Then she focused all her attention on Duke.
She unfastened the dress, her fingers precise and dextrous, sweeping over grommets and buckles and buttons and fine lacings. The outer shell first, peeling apart the embroidery hard as armor, the tips of her fingers like ghosts on the edge of Duke's awareness, barely there at all. Then Veronica's breath was warm and human on the back of Duke's neck as she came closer. She released the cruel pins through Duke's hair, letting it fall freely across her face and shoulders. Next was the corset, Veronica leaning in close to unlace it from her front. The leather knots were tied viciously tight. Duke could begin to breathe again, though her breath was still shallow and quick and heaving, damp in small, swollen puffs in her lungs.
Veronica knelt in front of her to finish unlacing the corset. For a moment she reached out to the side. Her cool fingers brushed the inside of Duke's wrist, the vulnerable slow-beating pulse, as if she wanted to reassure her. The touch seemed enough of an exchange, permission given so quickly and surely. Veronica went deeper without needing to ask. Her hands gently parted the petticoats, plucked away the linen undershifts, unseamed the whalebone rods. She seemed to do it all as easily as touching a ripe apple and feeling it come into your hand.
Under it all, Duke was in a green turtleneck and jeans, like any boring ordinary human girl. At least these clothes were easy to move in.
"They're going to catch us," Duke said.
"No." Veronica touched a grubby finger to Duke's lips, silencing her, a glint of gleeful mischief in her eyes. "You were right. I have a power. I don't know what it was supposed to be in the real world, but here I can make people believe what I want them to believe."
Veronica reached for an old broom in the corner of the target. She put the elaborate clothes around it, dressing up a scarecrow figure with a stick for a face and a hank of straw for hair, elaborate dress and jewels forced around it to make it the princess they wanted.
She dragged the doll with her to the window. The greedy eyes of the men in the tournament fell on Veronica, but she was unafraid.
"Here is your prize!" Veronica called with a piercing voice, and regally flung the straw doll from the window. The winds caught the dress fabric, making it flap like a kite. It blew and scurried above the men's heads. They chased it, tripping over each other, punching out, hands ripping and soiling the dress to pieces. It didn't even matter to them that the doll was a hank of straw instead of a person. Veronica pulled Duke away quickly.
They exited the filthy, cobweb-strewn tunnel somewhere in a brown clearing. Duke looked at her wrist, around where Veronica had clasped her, as if she might find it bruised or seared with a burn.
Veronica groaned. "Who makes the geometry of this place, the Mad Hatter? I started in the north, I think, and met you in the south. Is Heather in the east or west? I guess the wicked witch is supposed to come from one of those places ... West ... East ... West ... "
Veronica set a course to a goat track by their left. The thick grass walls around it made it look like the beginning of a corn maze.
"Off with her head," Duke joked, but it seemed like Veronica didn't hear her clever reference. Veronica stepped boldly forward, and Duke had no choice but to follow in her wake or be left behind.
The grass whispered to Duke.
You're powerless, it seemed to chant, whisper, susurrate over and over in the soft blowing of winds.
She listened.