As Rin locked the door and surveyed the damage to the wall, Daryl flopped back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “She didn’t deserve this. You didn’t have to …”
Rin groaned. “Are you still on about that? As they say, yours is not to reason why, yours is but to … well, just die. At least if you keep annoying me.”
Daryl sat up, but Rin pushed him back down on the bed — this time with his head against the wall — and straddled him.
“Now, here are the rules,” she explained. “I have suffered a grave loss. It is your job to console me. You will fail, because I am inconsolable. However, you will do your best or I will suffer a second …” she leaned in, her face inches from his, “… much smaller loss. Got it?”
Daryl swallowed his pride and nodded.
Rin leapt to her feet, once again allowing Daryl to sit up. “There, that’s much better. Just like old times.”
“I found you,” he pointed out, his voice laden with resentment.
“Yes, you did,” Rin beamed, mussing his hair in approval.
She sashayed over to Sree but suddenly looked tired. “For what it’s worth, she isn’t suffering.”
Quickly holding up her hand, she smiled at Daryl. “Please don’t say anything that would anger me. Despite what you may think, I would be sad to lose you as well.”
“You never had me, you evil bitch,” Daryl wanted to shout but bit his tongue instead.
“Which one did you use?” he at length asked.
“Which one? Ah, I see. You figured it out.” She studied him closely and smirked. “No, I’m giving you too much credit. Someone has been a noisy little bird.”
Daryl’s eyes instinctively went to Sree, and Rin smiled. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Just a bit disappointed. What have you been told?”
He looked away. “You are the Queen.” His eyes returned to Rin, and he braced for a verbal tirade. She had stormed out the last time he made this assertion, and he couldn’t imagine she would be thrilled to hear it repeated now.
Rin nodded without visible emotion.
“But you were the one betrayed. By Karkov.”
Rin said nothing.
“You were the Crafter,” Daryl added. “Is that wrong?” This last question had been intended to sound dramatic but came out sheepish.
Rin shrugged. “It is for the gods alone to judge what is right or wrong. But you are correct.”
“Why did you lie to me?” Daryl demanded, but Rin silenced him with a wave. She did not seem angry or impatient, just unwilling to answer.
“So you know how I encumber people, then?” she asked.
Daryl shook his head. “Sree explained some of it, but not much.”
Rin sighed. “And this is why you never should tell anyone anything.”
“But the ones we killed —”
“Were easy enough to be handled by conventional means. I told you, the low numbers usually don’t require anything a human can’t handle. I did use a sphere to encumber Vivvett, though.”
Daryl couldn’t believe Rin was being this forthright after deceiving him for so long. She gave him a long, hard look.
“How did you think I was encumbering otherwise-unkillable immortals?” She grinned at him. “By asking them nicely to stop existing?”
“I assumed the gods gave you a tool.”
“Well, Daryl, they did give me a tool. It’s called a brain. Apparently, you were not similarly blessed.”
“So the one you stole from Vivvett —”
“Well, it’s not really stealing if I created it.”
“Is that how you encumber them? By taking their spheres?” It all was beginning to make a strange sort of sense to Daryl.
“You do me an injustice. If it was that simple, anyone could do it.”
“I meant do you take them and change them? I don’t think anyone but the Crafter could do that.”
She shook her head. “I already told you that the spheres are as inviolable as their owners. Maybe I’ll explain it some other day. What I will say is that I encumber the Proteges with protections, similar to those which made them immortal in the first place.”
“In Vivvett’s case I used ‘I shall not change.’ I had planned on something nastier to repay her for the trouble she caused me, but I decided it would be pointless to resent an enemy just for being an enemy. That is a petty way to view the world. So I spared her anything worse.”
Daryl’s eyes moved to Sree, and Rin walked over to her.
“You wonder what I used on her. Nothing that easily can be described. I created a special cocktail of restrictive and ordinary protections. Loosely, their combined effect translates to ‘I cannot regret,’ though that is a vast oversimplification. She isn’t frozen in time but isn’t entombed in her body either. Instead, she perceives everything through a filter of optimism. The closest analogy is that she will live a fantasy forever, a dream informed by that which her senses observe. She cannot suffer or grow bored or weary or sad. And she never will feel the loss of awakening.”
Daryl couldn’t imagine Rin being merciful, let alone going to such lengths. “Why do so much for an enemy?” he wondered aloud.
Rin shot him a disgusted look. “You have to ask such a thing? Did you care so little for her?”
Daryl was taken aback but replied with a firm calmness. “No, it’s not that. I was … I am very angry that you did this. I hate you for it. But I also know you. This is not like you. You are much worse than this.”
“Yet you thought you could convince me. You must think very little of me.”
“Even less than that,” Daryl added sharply.
“You would do well not to provoke me right now,” Rin replied. There was a disturbing evenness to her voice, but Daryl sensed no real danger. That was what worried him.
Rin drew her face into an expression of hurt and dabbed at her eyes. “Knowing all this, don’t you feel a tiny drop of sympathy for the poor wronged Queen?”
“Fuck you.”
Rin brought her face close to his. “So eager. You’re a cruel man. Do you still want to kill me?”
“More than ever,” he growled.
She clasped her hands together and opined dramatically. “If only you had the power to.” Her voice grew flat. “But you don’t. You are a worthless, powerless pup. Yet I applaud your spirit. And you do have your uses.”
Rin graced him with a sweet smile. “If you said you pitied me, I would have killed you on the spot.”
Daryl had forgotten how miserable and thrilling and endlessly fascinating it was to be with Rin, and he hated himself for feeling anything other than anger.
“As for Sree,” she explained, “I will say two things and then we will speak of her no more. First, your own dismay at what happened pales beside my own. And, second, the choice was not mine.”
Daryl was shocked. Did Rin answer to somebody else? Who could force her to do anything against her will? He also wondered why she would tell him this if she didn’t care what he thought.
Giving Daryl a pained smile, Rin motioned him to come over. “Now it’s time for you to assuage my sorrow. But first, help me move her.”
As they lifted Sree and placed her in the kitchen, he suddenly realized something. “Can she see and hear us?”
Rin gave a laugh. “Well, yeah. I have no idea how we appear to her, though. Are you worried about a bit of voyeurism? You do know I’ve been watching you both for a while …”
In response to the discomfort on Daryl’s face, she shrugged. “Surely you suspected as much. Sadly, there wasn’t much to see. I could tell that she really liked you, though.”
“How?” Daryl stammered. This came as no surprise, but he was curious what Rin had observed.
“You’re alive.”
Daryl groaned. They were all the same.
“I believe she only held back romantically on my account,” Rin continued. Her eyes disdainfully swept over Daryl. “Unfortunately, you weren’t man enough to push past that particular obstacle.” Rin let out an audible sigh. “As I said, there wasn’t much to see.”
“You wouldn’t have minded?”
“You put too much stock in yourself, Daryl. If I minded you fucking other women I wouldn’t have thrown you out. I would have killed you instead. Personally, I think you were being very selfish.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Precisely. I’m sure she would have appreciated a nice send-off fuck.”
The ashtray shattered against Rin’s head, coating the counter in a fine ceramic dust.
“Well, that was a waste,” Rin observed as she shook some of the dust out of her hair. She grinned at Daryl. “I wonder where I’ll put out my cigarettes now.”
He said nothing and just seethed at her.
“If only you’d shown that level of passion for Sree instead of about her, her final years would have been much more pleasant.”
Daryl felt dizzy with rage. While he struggled to master his anger, Rin idly hummed a cheerful pop tune with an amused look on her face. During the journey to find her, Daryl had sworn to himself that he never again would let her get to him like this. He even had deluded himself into believing he could maintain control around her. Now he found himself as helpless as ever.
“Shall we continue?” Rin asked once he had calmed.
Daryl scowled and said nothing as he brushed past her into the kitchen.
When they finished moving Sree, something occurred to Rin. She motioned Daryl to stand opposite the statue.
“Look into her eyes and measure the distance between you,” she instructed. “You stand this close to her, but there is an impassable chasm between you. From now until the end of time, you never will know one another, never speak, never share. Your worlds have been irrevocably severed.”
Daryl rounded on Rin in anger before seeing her maudlin expression.
“It is the same with me and her,” she lamented. “But is that not true of us all, whether or not our limbs move and our mouths flap? From the day we are born until the end of the world, none of us ever knows another.”
She snapped out of it. “Well, I suppose life is painful enough without the rantings of an old hag. I suggest you fuck me to shut me up.”
Daryl was about to ask a question, but Rin put her finger to his lips. “What did I say about Sree? We speak of her no more.”
He was tempted to complain that she had broken her own prohibition, but thought better of it.
With a mischievous grin, Rin rotated Sree so she faced the bed again. “Propriety is overrated, I think.” She pulled Daryl toward the bed. “Let’s give her something to dream about.”
Despite himself, Daryl was overwhelmed with desire. But even as they embraced, something bothered him. What had Rin whispered to Sree?
I like that Daryl is finally sticking up to her. A little. And what did Rin whisper to Sree?