Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

her back. For they were naked now.

“Where is it?” he said, not loudly.

“What, darling?”

“You know what, Anna. Where?”

“No, I don’t kn…”

He got up and turned to her. His eyes were two bulbs of nothingness. He said, louder now, “Where?”

“I haven’t…”

“Yes, Anna, you have. You took the bottle out. What did you do with it?”

She put back her head. She challenged him angrily, “Why do you want it?”

“Why do you think?”

“Then you mustn’t have it, must you?”

He took a stride towards her. He was fierce, like the whirlwind, and she was afraid of him, but only for a second.

He had stopped himself. He looked at her, and she could see him again inside his eyes. Some of him, at least.

“Dearest Anna, you only mean to be good, I know. But you really must let me have it.”

A dim returning anger made her say, “Why are you so selfish, Árpád? What about me?”

“You…” His body was bowing over a little again, as it had always done. A slight stoop, what you might expect of a young man who worked at the accounts of others.

Then he put up his hands and smeared his face quickly over. The red salve bloodied and washed about, and out of it the true red reappeared, the warrior brand of the birthmark. “Look at me,” he said. And then, “Anna, I’ve had tonight. You gave me that. You meant only the best for me. Can’t you see what you’ve done?”

Anna trembled. Head up, she faced him, as if in the dock judges in black accused and condemned her.

“There’s only one night of carnival, Anna.”

“Well, then…” she faltered. She said rashly, “We just have to go back to what we had before. It was all right. It’s what you’ve always done.”

“Till now,” he said.

“But you saw…”

He said, “All my life, since I was aware, I’ve seen. How they look at me, or won’t look. When I was a child. When I tried to learn to be a priest and love a God who did this to me, and make myself beloved in turn so no one would mind my face… And tonight, I lived as the gods live, Anna. The real gods. That bitch with her rose and her stinking breath – and the pretty girls blushing – and you in my arms…”

“I love you,” she said. “I did it because I love you. Please – let’s just lie down and sleep. You’re so strung up, how can you be reasonable…?”

“How can I be reasonable, yes, Anna. How can I? Can’t you understand? I can’t go back to what I was. A year of that, waiting for carnival night again? No, not even with you, Anna. You were everything, but you’re not enough, not now. I want to be a human man. Only that. Not even this handsome prince you make believe I am. Just nothing, someone who can come and go unnoticed. Like the rest of you.”

She clasped her hands across her waist. She seemed to stand on a narrow plank above a twisting sea that had no floor.

“Árpád – forgive me – I only wanted…”

“I forgive you, Anna. I know. Don’t distress yourself. Now tell me where the bottle is.”

She lowered her head. She closed her eyes. Behind the mask she still had on, behind her shut lids, he could not see her.

“No.”

She had expected his rage probably, almost anything, but not what happened.

He was so gentle with her, even in the act of sex. Sometimes when moths came into the apartment, he had caught them in a goblet and set them free into the night.

When he struck her, reeling, almost falling, she thought it was some other thing, an accident of weather or some part of the ceiling crashing down.

But he struck her again, and she lay on the floor, tasting a thin trickle of blood from her lip.

She stared up at him. And he stood above her, enormous in the sombre hollow of the room, waiting.

“Tell me,” he said, breathless and hoarse, and catching her hands he pulled her halfway up and slapped her face again.

Had she cried out? She thought not. It had been so immediate, her screams, unuttered, were left behind.

As he dropped her back her head banged on the floor. She thought idiotically, I have to tell him. But she couldn’t remember what she was to tell. And when he ordered her again to tell him, she shook her stunned head, more in confusion than denial.

Then he kicked her. The blow was awful. Alive on its own, it didn’t hurt, yet threw everything else away.

The blow was so far removed from him. He was no longer Árpád, but some madman who had broken in.

She rolled sideways, and curled herself up by the table, which still bore a scatter of their normal life, plates, glasses, for these objects clattered, jittered, as he moved about the room.

He tore things apart in the room. Her few clothes, one curtain. Oddly he did not go to her bag lying in the bottom of the cupboard.

It was violence he wanted most, and acquiescence. She must give him the poison, drag it and present it to him on her knees. Tonight she was the one to blame. But she must answer now for all the world, which had hated and harried him and driven him insane.

Dully she thought, He’ll kill me anyway.

And in that moment he turned and veered back towards her, blundering mechanical and blind, like the darkened tram.

The light must be coming, morning, or a fire. There was redness on the room, and he was in the eye of it, the storm of the redness.

His face was unrecognisable, rags of scarlet and grey. His eyes were framed in blood.

Now she did wail in a fey lost voice, No, no, something like that, as he pulled her up once more.

He did not demand anything of her. He shook her, and she thought her skull would crack from her neck, but then she was falling and again the