In your hands lie the gates of godhood, let none pass.
He knows this is not godhood, but it is something sacred all the same. Séverin blinks, and feels the heady weight of responsibility filling his chest. Though he has played the divine lyre, this is the highest status he might attain.
He is here as an emissary to the heavens.
He is here to commune with something higher than himself.
He is here, fully mortal, to touch the eternal.
And nothing more.
“Sire,” says a voice at his elbow.
Séverin looks to his right. A light-skinned man wearing a veil offers him a candle. Another person steps before him, holding a large polished circle of bronze that acts as a mirror. In it, Séverin can see an ancient city in the midst of revels behind him. He sees himself and realizes he has been dressed in the raiments of a king. An ivory tunic and a finely dyed scarlet mantle of worsted wool and silk covers his body. A ribbon of thinly hammered gold twists about his brow. Someone has rubbed kohl around his eyes.
“She is beyond,” says the veiled man.
She.
As he moves to the platform, he sees a slender silhouette behind the candlelit drapes and realizes the platform is, in fact, a bed. There is a woman waiting for him there, and he understands that sometimes she is a priestess and sometimes she is a goddess… but always she is out of reach.
Slowly, he parts the silks and sees her reclining against rich cloths and pillows embroidered with silver thread. There are gold coins strung through her hair. She wears a shift of thinnest linen dyed a rich red. Her hands are adorned with henna, as if she were a bride, and he knows that tonight, she is one.
“Majnun,” she says.
Séverin remembers himself. All of his selves. He remembers staring down at Laila’s lifeless body, their friends hollowed out by grief beside them.
“Laila,” he says, and her name melts like a prayer on his tongue. “What’s happened?”
A shadow crosses her face, but then it vanishes. Instead, she moves a little, patting the place beside her.
“Come to me,” she says.
He does. He is almost afraid to touch her, terrified that she’ll dissolve beneath his fingertips. But he is spared from decision when Laila reaches for his hand. Her skin is warm. When he looks into her face, she smiles and it is the smile he has dreamt of many times.
In this moment, Séverin knows peace.
“All will be well,” says Laila. “They are safe, Séverin. No one will hurt them. No one can touch us here.”
This certainty moves through him, and though Séverin had imagined any failure would sting, this time he feels it like a pressure easing off his chest. He is not resigned to mortality, but oddly relieved by it, for in this moment, he knows he has done all he could, and even in failing, he has succeeded in keeping the people he loves safe.
Séverin blinks and remembers his losses. He thinks of Tristan’s gray eyes, the orange fragrance of his mother’s hair, the hard set of Delphine Desrosiers’s mouth. He once thought that all that pain must be in service of something greater, but now he knows that it was never for him to understand. And when he looks at the fathomless night sky, he feels a serene contentedness in not knowing.
He turns to Laila. “Are we dead?”
Laila bursts out laughing. “Why would you think that?”
“Maybe because this feels remarkably like heaven,” he says, stroking her hands.
Laila entwines their fingers, and his rib cage feels as though it might burst from joy.
“And what makes you so certain that you would be granted admittance to heaven?” says Laila.
Séverin grins. “Merely the hope that you’d be so awfully lonely and bored without me that you’d find a way to sneak me in.”
Laila laughs again. She faces him. He notices that there is a line of gold at her throat, and that when the breeze shifts, the candlelight snares on the lush curves of her body.
She tips up his chin with one finger. “And how would you cure such boredom,Majnun?”
