VI.

"I understand that you're suffering, Narcisse, I do, but let us be realistic. While we can agree that Mary was overzealous in her meting out of justice, we both know Eduard would have had to pay for his actions, criminal as they were, one way or another. What kind of message would it send if he were allowed to get off with but a slap on the wrist after poisoning an entire household? Women and children, no less. . . ."

But word of those deaths means nothing to him. No more than their lives ever did. The new spring foliage that hangs above his head mocks him, the hard liquor in his hand and on his tongue doing nothing to return the clarity he has lost.

Or is clarity the problem? For he has not been able to cease running through the ways things might have turned out differently for days, since learning of Eduard's death.

Or has it been weeks? He no longer knows, and it no longer seems to matter. So many years, erased in an instant. What does time matter anymore when the purpose of his life has been ripped away?

"To be perfectly honest, it's amazing he made it to the age he did. Carrying on like that, I would be surprised if he didn't have his share of rivals, waiting in the wings to do to him what he did to Lord Voland. . . ."

But Catherine's less than subtle accusations fall on deaf ears. He's locked his guilt all up inside an iron box inside himself. The weight of it bears on him every second, but he dare not look inside, examine its contents more carefully. Surely she must understand that. That if he let it sink in for a moment, truly sink in, that he had had it in his power to prevent this, and squandered every opportunity, it would kill him.

"When you look at it in that light, one could almost say it was a kindness, what happened to him—"

"A kindness?"

She stops her prattle at the tone of his voice, the bob in her throat barely perceptible, but there. She knows she has overstepped a line.

"You did not see his face." The memory of it haunts him still, at every moment, so much so that he doesn't know how he manages to speak. He can only conclude truth must have a way of making itself heard. "Even in death, the terror was frozen in his eyes."

And I could do nothing to protect him—nothing to save him, when he needed me the most. I did not even know. . . .

No. He must not blame himself for this. He did not put Eduard in shackles, did not turn a deaf ear to his cries for mercy. "Two weeks—two weeks he was kept locked in that hell, without even water to soothe his fever, let alone the barest of human sympathies. He died in agony, and despair—treated worse than even an animal. And you have the gall to speak to me of kindness—"

He notes the spasm of her arm, how instinct almost makes her reach out to him; but she overcomes it, and keeps her hand in her lap, while his clenches white around his cup.

"I am only trying to help," Catherine says, and at last she does him the courtesy of sounding genuinely remorseful. "To put things in perspective. Mary doesn't understand your agony. How can she? She isn't a mother. But I am. And I do understand what you're going through, Narcisse. I am no stranger to the loss of a child. It is a condition I would wish on no-one."

Then what made you think you had the right to take him from me? he longs to shout back—to shake into her and everyone else in this God-forsaken place until each soul is brought as low as he. He was mine, my son, my boy!

But words are only words, and his will free him from this torment no sooner or better than hers. Though he may throw them against the walls of his prison as hard as he likes, they will not extricate him from his own hell.

"I hear it said that in the New World, there are a people who cut the hearts from living victims to appease their savage gods."

He meets her eyes and sees her flinch. But from his words? He thinks not.

"Imagine how it must feel," he says, "to be one of those sacrifices. To be laid on that altar, feel your own heart ripped, still beating, from your body. To see it taken away, out of your reach, knowing that you can do nothing, nothing to get it back—"

"Am I to take that as a threat?"

And he almost laughs that she could misinterpret his meaning so greatly. She, who professes to know what it is to lose a child. The empty space where he knows his heart, somehow, though he cannot feel it, still beats, resonates with the urge. But to laugh? Or to scream, until his throat is raw and his ribs ache? If he did not already know how little it would do to fill the void inside himself.

"It's not a threat," he says through teeth clenched against the pain, against the outrage. "Merely an observation you and your surviving children would do well to take to heart. That there is none so dangerous as a man who has nothing left to lose."