Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

HOME AGAIN

CONCLUSION

From the high balcony, David Lawry looked over the night.

“I had no idea,” he murmured. “All of this….  Is yours?”

“Well, it’s Christopher’s,” Tanitha said. “He is lord of this and three other domains. Lawrence has his own, and I suppose I do too. And there are others, other holdings. But none of them is Visistruta, the homeland, the original holding.”

“I guess over.. time… you might end up with a lot of things, places… Castles.”

“You mean over centuries,” Tanitha corrected him,

“Yes,” David said. “I supposed I did.”

“Once,” she said, “it was like any kingdom. We held Visastruta and the lands around it. We were lords like any lords of the land. Princes. But time went on, and things changed. In old times we were a protection against enemies and then in latter days few wanted to be ruled by deathless drinkers of blood and, in the end, many wished for no lords at all. Rather than try to hold onto that land, we spread out, a network, a town here, a holding there, a duchy somewhere else. The kingdom became a web, in old times connected by ancient roads, roads that only certain folk could follow.”

“Certain folk?” David said. “Drinkers.”

“Witches, sorcerers, shapechangers.”

“Shapechangers.”

“Mostly werewolves.”

David blinked at her.

“Why be surprised? Did you think out of all the things you’d heard about, we were the only ones that were real?”

When David did not answer, Tanitha said, “This very castle once belonged to a family of bisclavret—werewolves. But they gave it to us, a gift, long ago.”

“And all of these towns and castles are part of your kingdom?”

“Yes.”

“Mortals too?”

“Yes.”

“And are there many Drinkers?”

“Not as many as there were,” Tanitha said, “but more than you would think.”

“Then… there must be other kingdoms.”

“Yes,” Tanitha said. “In the same way that Visastruta’s kingdom spread out like a net, went underground, became quiet and hid behind companies and businesses, the other great kingdoms of the time did the same. And then there were human kingdoms which, in their way, had what you might call shadow kingdoms under drinker lords, and when the human kingdoms disappeared, the Drinker ones remained. Dealing with mortal powers, we present as businesses and have corporate representatives. But with the drinker kingdoms we still have royal visits, ambassadors.”

David went inside. He was no Drinker, and the cold did matter. He went to the wine, and the little snacks on the table. Tanitha followed.

“That day when we found Dan—dead—and brought him to the morgue, and then he disappeared, and then I found him alive again and I lost my mind, I was terrified. I didn’t even think I would pursue it.”

Tanitha sat down beside him on the bed.

“I thought… to look into such things would lead to madness and… devils, and now, at the end of it, here I am in a French castle, with a beautiful woman who is a princess of an invisible kingdom.”

Tanitha kissed him, and she squeezed his hand, but what she said to David was, “The thing about life, and the thing about life with us, is that amidst the magic and the beauty you may find more than enough room for madness and devils before long.”

They lay together in the dark, the most extraordinary feeling in David as he held that small woman in his arms.

“I feel like I’m your protector, but that’s not really possible is it?”

“I feel like I’m protected,” she said, pressing herself into him as his arms went tighter about her. “So I don’t see why it isn’t.”

“I am just a very, very mortal man, and you are… not mortal at all.”

“There is truth to that,” Tanitha said at last, and she smelled of sharp spices, like jasmine, like rose incense, “and yet, there are other things beside strength that matter.”

He kissed the back of her head and then rose to kiss her cheek, stroke her extraordinary wealth of hair.

“This castle belonged to Chris and the man he loved?”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember him?”

“I never knew him well, but I remember him.”

“And Chris never found anyone else?”

“Not yet.”

David sighed.

“What is it?” Tanitha asked him.

“You were married. Once?”

“It was long ago.”

“To a… to a regular person like me?”

“I don’t know how regular you are, David,” she said, with the touch of a laugh in her voice. “And certainly Denis was not regular either.”

David tried to laugh.

“Do you wish you could turn me? Is that what you would want?”

She turned around and looked at him. Her hair was so long that even when she turned some of it was still threading through his fingers.

“How long has that been on your mind?”

“I can’t make you happy,” David said. “How can I? I can’t imagine…. I…How can you keep living with someone knowing they aren’t going to last?”

“Do you want to be a Drinker?”

“I want to be me,” he said. “But I worry for you. Maybe I think of myself too highly. Maybe you would get over me very quickly but—”

“David, bite your tongue.”

She did not say it roughly, but she said it solidly, and she sat up in bed.

“To be what we are is to embrace sorrow every day. My mother, she was one of us, and yet she was still killed. The possibility of being immortal does not mean that one actually is. All of us have lost many. Many. My heart is full of grief. I never forget Denis. But the price of love is grief.  Do not ask me to imagine the years, the decades, the centuries without you, David, when what we have is now. When in the now you are right here beside me.”

David said nothing. He only nodded.

“Nothing is promised,” Tanitha said. “There is only now.”