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“It really is a bit much, isn’t it?” Gertrude says, fixing the sky with a look of withering disdain.
“Understatement of the century, perhaps,” Adelard replies, and wishes he hadn’t. It’s hard to say whether centuries still mean anything here. He feels no younger, but his resurrected body has taken on an aged-oak endurance – no need for sleep, for food or rest, and whenever he allows his thoughts to wander, he tastes ash and metal on a nonexistent wind. He knows what it means. He’s less clear on the why of it, and Gertrude’s speculations worry him. What had kept him alive had been an act, she believes, of faith. He doesn’t like the thought that at the end, what he’d had faith in hadn’t been his God.
But it hadn’t been that god, either, the false one leering from above; it’s only Gertrude that thing tries to lay claim to, and if it had ever been easy for her to pull against its leash, it can’t be easy now.
“Ignore it,” he says. “All it can do is watch.”
She turns to him, resting a hand on a low, bucolic stone wall. They stand on the border of a Slaughter domain; the green fields beyond are wide and gentle, utterly unattainable.
“I am trying to think,” she says, placing each word like a piece on a game-board, “about how to reverse this. Every time I try, it pulls my thoughts away.”
Her mouth is a thin, tight line. The deep grooves at the corners of her lips betray more tiredness than he suspects she wants to reveal, but the undercurrent in her voice is triumph, and all at once, he understands what she cannot say and needs him to know.
If victory were impossible, she would have known it.