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Ecdysis

They go upstairs, and shut the guest bedroom door behind them. Almost before the click of the latch, Laudna begins to shed her skin. Her fingers tug and tear at the clasps and bindings of the golden chains and the jeweled collar and the gilded cage she’s been held fast within, fumbling to loosen the knots holding her sash of trinkets around her waist, raking at the buttons of her blouse for an exit.

With a wry smile Imogen moves from the door to help expedite the process, but coming closer to her she realizes that instead of eagerness, there’s a near-frantic desperation to the way she’s pulling at her clothes. Her hands are shaking, and her breath comes in sharp hisses between her clenched teeth. As her fingernails pluck at her sleeves along the row of gold-plated buttons confining her arms from elbow to wrist there’s the pop of a ripped stitch and a button hits the floor with a tiny ping!, then rolls away into a crack between the floorboards. Laudna curses softly through her teeth.

“Here. Let me help you.” Taking her hand, Imogen strokes her forearm reassuringly through the sheer fabric of her sleeve and then begins to undo the buttons.

“It’s too tight.” With her free hand Laudna tugs at the unyielding high collar of her stiff organza blouse and then scrabbles her fingers around to the back of her neck where there’s an even longer line of little buttons running up her spine.

“I know,” Imogen says, in commiseration, “I know you hate that.” She’d guessed that Laudna’s new look wasn’t of her own design, but there was no point in saying anything about it, yesterday. In all the time she’d known her, Laudna had hated the feeling of rough fabric on her fragile skin, of clothing too tight to let her fidget, and of anything close around her throat. What petty cruelty, that her clothes should be chosen to be such a knowing torment to her, not just a constant irritation to her senses but a glimpse of her tormentor in every reflection. “Hold still, I’ll have you free in a minute.”

Working as quickly as she can, Imogen undoes the buttons on her sleeves, then turns her by the shoulders to reach the rest of them. A few strands of her hair straggled loose from the high bun confining the rest of it are snarled around the buttons going up her back, and, taking care not to tug, she unwinds and lays the lock of hair over Laudna’s shoulder so she can unbutton her. The blouse is torn along the seam of her shoulder and sticking damply to her back where she’d lain on the makeshift operating table downstairs. When Imogen finally peels it away she realizes that the dark spots of patchy opacity seeping through the thin fabric aren’t just sweat.

“Oh, honey,” she murmurs in dismay, “You’re one big ol’ bruise under here.”

Any thoughts she’d had of going to bed soon scatter from her mind like butterflies. Instinctively she reaches out to touch her, then flinches her fingers away, afraid of causing her more pain than she has already today. Laudna glances back over her shoulder and draws her arms inward, self-consciously curling her hand over the place that had taken the worst of it. Her shoulder had nearly been bludgeoned from its joint before Fearne’s magic had stitched it back in place, and her skin is still a garden of blood and bruises, purple-black violets blooming in mottled clusters under her skin. There’s ichor dried in trickles down her neck from the corners of her mouth and from her eyes into the hollows of her cheeks that she doesn’t seem to realize.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry. I should have . . .” She rolls her shoulder haltingly, making an uncomfortably crunchy sound, but after a moment it seems to be moving more easily. “I didn’t think about it. She . . .” she hesitates, and casts her glance away from Imogen’s, “I’m used to Delilah patching me up with her magic when it was needed. It benefited her to keep her vessel in good repair, you know. Now I suppose I have to draw on her power myself. It’s sort of like . . . like when you remember you’re breathing and then you have to do it consciously until you forget.” She pauses, then mutters quietly to herself, “Oh, no.” After a long moment, she draws in a measured, deliberate breath.

“Well, shit.” Imogen realizes her lungs aren’t moving either and prompts herself to breathe in. “Now you got me thinkin’ about it, too. Here, let’s get this corset off of you.”

She loosens the laces up the back while Laudna unhooks the fasteners down the front until she’s able to shrug it off. When she can move more freely she twists her waist out of the gilded bars of the cagelike crinoline and pushes it over with a clatter, then wiggles out of her overskirts.

“Better?” Imogen asks when Laudna is liberated of her clothing down to her chemise. She rocks lightly on her feet, patting her bare toes against the wooden floor, and nods. Imogen strokes her arms gently, being mindful of her bruises. “I’m gonna go get some water, get you cleaned up, okay?” Receiving another nod, she takes the ewer from the washstand and goes out.

When she returns Laudna is crouched by the fireplace their host lit for them with her arms wrapped around her legs, staring thoughtfully into the flames. She should have thought to get her some nice new underthings when they were in Jrusar, Imogen reflects. The chemise she has on is old, the cotton lawn worn and washed so many times it’s practically translucent, and the firelight shining through it captures the shape of her bony figure in sharp-edged silhouette. It’s a simple shift, plain except for a red satin ribbon and a little mother-of-pearl button at the yoke that Laudna had sewed on to make it a little more fancy. She wonders what kind of clothes Laudna would wear, now that she has the means and the agency to choose them for herself. She should take her shopping tomorrow in Rexxentrum to find out.

Sitting down beside her, Imogen levitates the washbasin and towel over to herself and pours out a little of the water, using magic to heat it as it falls into the bowl. She soaks the towel in the steaming water and wrings it out, then lightly touches Laudna’s chin to turn her face towards her. She startles a little, not from the heat but as though she hadn’t expected to be touched.

Imogen withdraws her hand. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you want to do it yourself?”

But she shakes her head and unfolds herself, leaning towards her. Imogen delicately cleans the blood and ichor from her face, then traces the tracks of her inky tears gingerly down her neck to where they have collected and dried in the hollow of her throat. She tries not to think about how many of the still-oozing rips in Laudna’s paper skin she had made herself, as she continues methodically sponging the damp cloth over her collarbone to her shoulder, to her elbow, to the tips of her restless fingers. Laudna says nothing, her attention focused inward, but as Imogen works she notices the glow in her chest beginning to shine more brightly through the cage of her ribs. Gradually the scrapes and cuts and bruises of what had seemed an endless day fade away, as she quietly mends her dead flesh from within while Imogen’s hands soothe it from without.

Laudna opens and closes her hand a few times, contemplatively inspecting the healed skin of her arm. “I could do anything I want now.”

“Mm-hmm. Anything you want. The power’s yours now.”

“I could get new clothes, or I could . . . I could take my hair down!”

Imogen chuckles lightly, turning her head to get a better look behind Laudna’s shoulder blade. “You could do that right now, if you wanted.”

She does, scattering hairpins as the black and white cascade comes down around her shoulders. Imogen watches it fall with some relief. The severe updo had looked a little too similar to something she’d glimpsed sometimes when Laudna’s bad dreams bled into hers. Laudna pulls her hair over her shoulder and combs her fingers through it to remove the remaining hairpins. “I could cut it,” she muses tentatively.

“You’d look real cute with short hair,” Imogen offers, amiably. Immediately Laudna retrieves her scissors from her coiled sash of ribbon and seizes a handful of her hair. “Only if you want to!” Imogen appends quickly, noting with some alarm the grim resignation on her face as the blades snick open alongside her jaw.

Laudna lowers the scissors slightly, drawing her eyebrows together in a puzzled expression. “Do you want me to cut it?”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Laudna admits. “I haven’t . . . it’s been a while, since I’ve been able to want anything for myself. I haven’t really had enough time to learn what it is that I want. Only about half an hour or so.”

“You’ve got plenty of time to think it over.”

“All right.” Slowly she closes the scissors, and lays them down on the hearth rug. “I think I like it long,” she decides cautiously, glancing up at Imogen as though to check for her approval, “but I don’t want it to be up, anymore.”

“You’d be gorgeous either way,” Imogen assures her.

“Even if I were bald?” Laudna asks, and this time there’s a mischievous quirk in the corner of her mouth that Imogen hasn’t seen in a long time.

“Start usin’ the crystal we stole from that bunny, and we might find out.”

Moving around behind her, she tugs gently on a handful of her chemise to ease it out from under her. Laudna shifts herself to accommodate her, sitting on her feet so Imogen can lift it up to see her back. There’s a set of vertical grooves crossing her ribs where something — Ashton’s hammer, a chunk of rubble wielded by her own telekinesis — had slammed into her so hard that the boning of her corset was pressed into her skin. She winces, remembering the snap of bone and the yelp that had escaped her. Soaking the towel again, she lays it gently against the hurt place, and feels her relax a little.

For a while there’s no sound but the rustling of the fire in the hearth and the occasional splash of water. With her circlet in place, the voices of the other Hells are only muffled, wordless sounds from downstairs.

Laudna seems to notice, too, because she remarks, “It’s so quiet.”

“Mm-hmm. It’s nice.”

Laudna raises one angular shoulder to gesture to her head. “Up here, I mean. It’s all . . . empty, and echoey. I’m not really used to it,” she admits in a low voice, “I haven’t been alone in my own head in such a long time. For so long, I had . . . not just her in there, but Pâté, too . . . and you,” she turns her head to smile over her shoulder, and there’s a shy and delicate warmth to her voice on the word. Then she looks back down at the rug, where she has been crafting an intricate geometric pattern out of her hairpins. “Then, one by one . . . you all left.”

“I thought you might want some space,” Imogen says, in mild surprise, “But I can come in, if it’ll help you feel more comfortable.”

“It is a little lonely in here,” she says wistfully.

“All right.” It’s not hard to pick out the thread of silken sound from the weave of other thoughts around them as she opens her mind to Laudna’s. Knock knock! she calls into her head, Hi, honey.

Welcome home, my love, comes the response, and she can hear the smile in it even though Laudna’s face is turned away from her. The only thing she’d regretted about shielding her mind from everyone was no longer being able to hear the joyful hum of one mind in particular. The awareness of her circles the walls of her skull with an easy familiarity and then settles, curling up like a cat returning home, into the little Laudna-shaped space she’d always used to keep open for it.

Letting the chemise fall, Imogen sets aside the towel, now the dull purplish color of diluted ink, and regards her handiwork with relief. There’s a pair of freckles usually hidden behind her sleeve on the back of one pale shoulder, one a little bigger than the other like the two moons in orbit around them. Leaning forward, she gives a gentle kiss to them, and feels Laudna’s attention return to her from wherever it’s been, warming her like the heat of the fire as she turns her body towards her.

That feel better?

Yes. Thank you, darling.

To finish it off she rolls a little line of sparks in a simple cleaning spell over the fabric of her chemise, lifting the bloodstains from it. Seeing what she’s doing, Laudna turns around to return it, starting to pull the dried blood and grime and sweat from Imogen’s clothes with her own magic. The dirt peels off like goo clinging to her fingertips, and she flicks it away into the fire where it lands with a hiss. Imogen wants to tell her that she doesn’t need to do that — they’re just going to come off in a minute — but she can feel her enjoying being able to reciprocate the care she’d given her, so she lets her.

May I take this off? Laudna asks, tugging at the buckles of her leather bodice.

Of course.

She tilts her torso towards her a little, waiting expectantly for her to move on to the buttons of her dress, but instead she takes the bodice into her lap and regards it critically, then spins a spectral red thread between her fingers and begins to mend the scorch marks left by the untimely fireball Imogen had somehow managed to cast on the two of them. Imogen sits back on her heels, impatiently.

“You don’t have to do that right now,” she says aloud.

“Oh.” Laudna sets the bodice aside and regards her uncertainly, putting the tip of her forefinger between her lips and letting her head list to one side. To give her the nudge she seems to be waiting for, Imogen grasps the heel and toe of one of her boots in her hands and begins tugging it off. Laudna scootches forward a little to help her with the other, and then — finally — her nimble fingers are working at her buttons, at her laces, and at last Imogen is divested of her dress and britches and her lumpy knitted socks. Laudna leans forward with a little coo of concern to examine the singe on her camisole where the flames had gone all the way through, but Imogen catches her hands.

“It’s fine. I’m fine. C’mon.”

The bed is soft enough to be welcoming to guests, (although not soft enough to invite them to stay overlong), with feather pillows and a straw mattress that rustles softly beneath them. And for once, there is no uninvited guest. At last, they are lying side by side in bed, with no long-dead necromancer in between them. No decrepit ghost whispering into Laudna’s mind as she covers Imogen’s lightning-struck scars with cool, playful little kisses from her fingertips to her cheeks. No ever-watching presence looming over them as Imogen buries her fingers in Laudna’s hair and pulls her close. Even Pâté is still ensconced in the wherever-he-goes when he’s gone. They are finally, for the first time, alone.

But as Imogen leans over to blow out the candle on the nightstand, she can hear Laudna’s thoughts whirring like the wings of a summer cicada.

“Hey,” Imogen says softly, cupping Laudna’s face in her hand and running her thumb over the sharpness of her cheekbone. “It’s okay. There’s nothin’ to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Laudna insists, too quickly.

“You, um.” She glances down to the lambent purple glow of the soul anchor, pulsing behind her ribs in time to her heartbeat. The bright-dim-bright-dim pace of it is almost lively. “You have a tell.”

“I just — I don’t want to disappoint you,” Laudna confesses, shrinking down a little into the pillows.

“You couldn’t,” Imogen assures her, leaning in for a kiss. She slides her hand up her thigh, inching the hem of her chemise upwards. “This okay?” she murmurs, close to her ear.

Laudna’s fingers crawl uncertainly up Imogen’s arm, creeping along the lines of her scars to her neck. “Mhm,” she nods.

But she’s lying. If the flickering firefly light in her chest weren’t enough of a giveaway her mind is chirring in a messy panic now. Her stomach is still hurting and her lungs hitch painfully in her recently-opened ribs as she tries to remember to breathe.

Laudna.

Laudna, shh. Suppressing a sigh, she takes her face in her hands and kisses her clammy forehead. It’s okay. You’re all right. We’ll take it nice ‘n’ slow, okay?

Okay.

Imogen feels her mind flutter hastily backwards for some scrap of insight on how to proceed, skimming over images like a dragonfly skipping over the surface of a river. Regrettably (and endearingly), the extent of her experience seems to be witnessing goats beget more goats on her family farm and the waterstained passages of a tawdry romance novel she’d once found abandoned under a park bench, lurid half-smeared words glimpsed between her fingers in scandalized fascination. Relieved to have stumbled upon the source of her hesitation, she breathes the huff of a little laugh against her neck.

“Oh, honey, no . . .”

Laudna squeezes her eyes shut. Her ribs heave once in a sigh of resignation, and Imogen is dragged down with her as she opens her mind to memories she’d tried to put out of it. Memories of waking pounding-hearted from dreams that weren’t her own, with images of a man with sharp eyes and a sharper mouth thrust unbidden into her mind, a man she’d feared in life but in death had been compelled by someone else’s consciousness to love. Memories of the mingled terror and thrill of desire that wasn’t her own being foisted on her, awakening emotions she’d never experienced on her own, hadn’t even thought herself capable of. Memories of phantom hands on her body, too cold, too close, too intimate.

Imogen slams shut the mental connection between them so abruptly that Laudna jumps. She sits up, sparks of horror and anger and revulsion crawling through her veins and out to the ends of her hair.

“Gods, Laudna, I—”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Laudna leans up to press a clumsy kiss to her lips, and when Imogen, stiff-backed, does not return it she scrambles out of the bed. “I’m sorry.”

“Laudna — honey, wait, come back here . . .”

But she’s gone, with only the creak of the casement window and a rush of the chilly Zemnian night air in her wake.

Muttering a curse under her breath towards herself, or Laudna, or the absent woman whose presence, nonetheless, is still haunting them, Imogen gets out of bed. She goes to the window and leans out over the sill. Laudna is clinging, a pale thing of sharp-jointed spidery limbs, to the rough stone of the wall, almost hidden under the eaves of the roof.

“Laudna? You all right up there?”

No response.

“I’m not mad at you, sweetheart,” Imogen hazards a guess at the reason for her reluctance, “But I think we need to talk. You wanna come back inside?”

“No.”

“Can I come out, then?”

After a moment her voice descends to her, thin and fragile as a thread of spider-silk. “All right.”

Imogen shrugs on her unbuttoned dress, just so she’s not flying over the city in only her underwear, and floats out to meet her. Laudna scuttles sideways up the wall half a pace, but doesn’t flee. She’s shivering, and her chemise clings damply to her pale body like the filmy exuviae of an emerging moth. The only indication of her face behind the straggling skein of hair is the reflection of Imogen’s lightning veins in the black marbles of her eyes as she peers at her from beneath her arm. Reaching behind her elbow, Imogen gingerly parts the curtain and tucks it behind her ear. Underneath, her face is striped with tears, and she realized with a sinking heart that she’s pushed her too far.

“Oh, honey.”

“I’m sorry,” Laudna whispers, in a raspy husk.

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

“I know you were so looking forward to being rid of her. So we could be alone. But it’s as though . . . she can’t be truly gone, as long as the memory of her is still there. And it might take me a while, to let go of that memory.” She shuffles her hands and feet apologetically against the stone. “I know it’s not what you wanted.”

“What do you want, Laudna?” Imogen asks, giving voice again to the question that has been spinning itself in the air between them all night.

“I just want for you to be happy,” she replies, perplexed, as though Imogen should have known the answer already, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”

“That’s not enough,” Imogen protests.

Laudna shrinks back against the wall. “I know,” she says morosely, ducking her head so that her hair obscures her face again. “I fucked it up. I’m so sorry, you’ve been waiting for this for so long and I’ve made everything so awkward —”

“No,” Imogen interrupts her firmly, “I mean it’s not enough for you to just want what I want. That’s no better than just wantin’ what she wanted. You’re a whole person. It’s okay for you to want things for yourself. You get to have that life now.” Laudna simply hangs there in silence. “And it’s okay for you to not want things, too,” she adds, more gently.

Laudna shrugs the strap of her chemise, which has subjected itself to the whims of gravity and the night breeze, back up over her shoulder. “I’m not sure what I want yet,” she confesses, “I’m going through a bit of an ecdysis at the moment.”

Imogen raises her eyebrows, waiting for her to follow that thought.

“It’s the process by which spiders and caterpillars and other creepy-crawlies shed their old skin,” she says, an explanation so perfectly her that a smile tugs at the corner of Imogen’s mouth, “when they’re growing, or turning into something new. I’m not sure who I’m going to be, when it’s over. It’s been . . . so very long, since I’ve felt like myself. I’m not entirely sure what that feels like yet.”

“I think that’s just part of bein’ alive, findin’ out what you mean by ‘yourself.’ I’m sure not the same person I was ten years ago.” She holds out her arms, with their crawling lines of lighting. “Feels like I’m still shuckin’ off the old skin sometimes too.”

The slice of Laudna’s smile cuts through the dark. “I suppose I have . . . the whole rest of my life to figure it out. Who I am.”

She’s thinking about the future again. Their shared hope of a life together, peace in each other’s company and a home in a little cottage somewhere, had dwindled to a page in a storybook over the past few days. Something to dream about, but never to have.

“Mm-hmm,” she says, trying not to distress her by letting the tears in her eyes fall, but she can’t keep the relief from trembling in her voice. “And you know I’m gonna love whoever that is. Whatever kinda creepy-crawly you turn out to be, I’m gonna love it with my whole heart.”

A vagrant hush of wind billows her loose chiffon skirt around her ankles, and she shivers. It’s colder than a frost salamander’s toenails out here.

“You ready to come inside?”

She nods. Slowly, one limb at a time, Laudna detaches herself from the wall and surrenders herself to Imogen’s outstretched arms. She lays her head on her shoulder with a tired sigh. Through her thin skin and thinner clothing she is trembling from cold or emotion, and in her arms she feels as light and vulnerable as a moth newly struggled from its cocoon.

Cradling her close, she squeezes back in through the window and glides across the room to return her gently to the bed. Laudna draws herself up into a melancholy bundle of limbs as Imogen drops lightly onto the mattress beside her.

“Hey,” she says softly, nudging her with her shoulder, “I’m sorry, for pushin’ you farther than you were ready for. Especially after all you’ve been through today.”

Laudna shakes her head, shrouding herself with her hair once more. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid . . . I can’t be everything you need me to be. At least not right now.”

“What I need right now is for you to feel safe, and loved. But for the record,” reaching in through her hair, she touches her wet cheek, and with her inky fingertip she draws a little heart over the glowing place in her chest, “I like the ooze.”

Laudna turns her face to her, resting her head against her knees, and smiles. The light of her heart pulses softly over the delicate outlines of her features, and in her face is the fragile uncertainty of youth and the long weariness of age. “Maybe someday?” she says, “if . . . if it’s you. But not tonight.”

Imogen soothes a circle into her back with the palm of her hand. “All right. What do you want, tonight?”

For a long moment she is silent, wrapping a few strands of her spidersilk-fine hair around her fingers while she gives the question the first real consideration she has in thirty years. “Could you . . .” she asks shyly, at last, “will you just — hold me?”

So she does. Easing her down onto the pillows, she takes her in her arms and draws the blankets close around them both with her psychic hand so that she doesn’t have to let her go, kisses her forehead and cuddles her until the loose-limbed languor of sleep settles into her bones.

“Imogen?” Laudna murmurs drowsily into her neck, snuggled up against her on the edge of wakefulness.

“Mm?”

“That skirt cage thing she made for me. Let’s keep it.”

“Mm.”

“We can use it to grow tomatoes. When we have our little cottage.”