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Anne was nearly the last ghost to visit him on his last night, asleep in the king's tent. She looked upon his face and felt the familiar stirrings - hatred tied up with fondness, and anger with lust - even without her mortal flesh to move her. It had become a habit, hating Richard and loving her hatred. It had kept her living through her second marriage in life, and even now, in death, it bound her to the edge of life's realm. Hating Richard was such a habit that she had come to his side once more, although she was months in her grave.
If he had not killed her, she might have sat vigil until dawn's battle. She might have kept away the last vengeful ghost, and prevented the others returning. But he had doomed her - the second time by murdering her, but the first time by marrying her and tying her to him, so that even sharing her first husband's fate she did not share his death. Instead she would share Richard's, Anne thought, and she entered his dreams.
The others had brought him visions of the battlefield and the executioner, and the princes' jail cell in the Tower. But Richard liked to be called a villain - liked to be cursed - and Anne would not grant him that pleasure straight away. Instead she drew him to their wedding day once more, and let his living mind paint the details that slipped from her ghostly recollections: the dress she had worn, the hall of the church, the guests, ranging from merry to uncomfortable. She conjured up for him the droning clergyman who had married them and the tears in her own eyes, and she let Richard, still asleep, still unaware even in the dream, take in the dream.
When he turned his head towards her and smiled as though fond, though, she was enraged anew. "Did you love me, then?" said Anne, instead of the vows she had tried to mean on that day. "Or did you even then plan my death?"
Richard frowned. The ceremony went on around them, the audience unmindful of the departure from the script. Something stirred in his face.
"Your wife, Richard. Anne, your wretched wife," she said, and the brocade became the tattered shrouds of a tomb months closed, hanging on the frame of a corpse. Richard recoiled and she stepped into him. "Think of me, Richard, on the battlefield tomorrow!" Anne said, and took another step, dragging the tattered train of the dress with her.
If he had fled from her - if he had even recoiled again after the first shock - she would have cursed him as she had planned, and left him to his visions and his fate. There were other ghosts for him tonight, and there would soon be nothing else. But Richard had not run from confrontation with her when they had met over the dead king her father-in-law's corpse and he did not run from her now, even as she made him see a skull's visage in his bride's face.
"Jesu," he breathed more than said, looking at her, and he did not run. "Anne?" And he dared reach for her, although his hand drew back before he touched the fabric of the moldering dress over her shoulder.
"You see what you have done to me," said Anne, and stared at him through the dark pits of a skull's eyes. But she could not maintain it. His face softened, somehow, and she knew that he looked upon her real face. Her body had been accustomed to the weight of well-made fabric and her face had still been fair with youth in death, and without the full concentration of her spite her mind slipped and recreated them.
Richard was nevertheless afraid. "I had to," he said - he always had an excuse, of course. "My kingdom could not be safe until I wed my niece."
"And Elizabeth is unwed, and your kingdom is unsafe still," said Anne. "And you must face your enemies with the curse of your wife. Did you tell her you loved her, Richard, as you once told me? Did you tell her her beauty moved you to kill her brothers?"
It might have been her mind or it might have been his, but the scene around them slipped back in time again. The aisle up the church's hall became the street where Richard had waylaid her with her father-in-law's corpse. She saw him recognize it as she did, and as he had once, he knelt, and drew the dagger that now hung from his belt, and he offered it to her, hilt-first.
"I should have taken your life," she said, and put her hand on the dagger.
"Then take it now, fair Anne, if ghosts may do murder in dreams," said Richard, and one more time he laid his breast bare for her.
"I shall not, for another has claim on your life," said Anne. "You shall die tomorrow at another's hand, and not tonight at mine."
Yet she took the dagger.
When she put it to his breast, she watched his eyes track the blade and his breaths grow fast. The memory of her heart beat, too, and the memory of her groin tightened. Oh, she had hated this reaction - had hated herself and feared herself, too. It hardly mattered now. She was dead and could admit no further sin. He was dead, too, though he did not yet know it. He would die in the morning.
Anne drove the dagger into Richard's breast. It was easy. Probably it was easier than it would have been in reality, but then with her living grief she might not have found it a difficult task if she had steeled herself - or if she had been hastier and moved before he had spoken again.
Richard did not so much scream as gasp. Blood rushed over his breast and over her hand in a wave. Anne did not know if it was more or less than there would really have been. But Richard's eyes stayed open and clear as he wavered on his knees, and he mouthed her name.
"Oh, it's only a dream," said Anne. "You will die in the morning. Though I wish I had really done it."
"You told me so, often enough," croaked Richard.
"It had stopped being true by the end," said Anne, "I hardly hated you when you killed me." She pulled the dagger free and raised it, thinking of dealing him another blow. But as in reality her hesitation was her undoing. Richard seized her free hand and kissed it with his bloodless lips, and she wavered.
"Fair Anne," Richard said, and took the other hand too, and kissed the blade of the dagger. Anne's breath caught, looking at Richard's blood streaked across his lips. He turned his face and pressed his cheek to the blade and closed his eyes.
"A murderer's blood," said Anne through her heavy breaths. She forgot to be conscious of the fact that her body was not real and her lust was only a memory drawn together by hatred. She forgot she was dead and Richard was alive. She forgot Richard's oncoming doom. She knew only that her hand trembled on the knife, and the knife lay against Richard's cheek, and red blood streamed over his bare breast and his lips both.
"I did love you, Anne," said Richard, eyes still closed. "But it was after I sought to kill you. For yes, I never thought to keep you long in the beginning."
Just as she really had, Anne dropped the dagger. This time she did it to slap him.
Richard laughed, and he rose. He was still streaked in blood - as he ought to always appear, Anne thought bitterly - but the wound at his breast had closed. Anne had the power to end the dream, to reopen the wound, to make him see whatever she liked, but she could not kill him here.
He took her in his arms, just as he had before her death, and kissed her. She bit his lips, but she had done that before and he was not perturbed. She felt his cock harden against her, through the clothing, and she knew then that she would have him, one last time. Perhaps she would stab him again after, too.
Once she had been ashamed of this, frightened by the way her lust came a heartbeat after her anger at him. Now that shame was ridiculous, except in that perhaps it had lured her from her senses when she might have fled and preserved her life. He had murdered her. What was the point in shame?
Anne kissed Richard and put her hand to his face, feeling the drying streaks of blood. She swayed into the kiss.
They broke only reluctantly. "Will it curse me, to lie in dreams with a ghost?" said Richard, and stroked her hair with his finger tips.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. It does not matter," said Anne. "I came to curse you and can give you no worse a doom than you had before I came. You will die in the morning, Richard."
"Then you have come to send me off, one final time?"
"Perhaps I have," said Anne, and stooped to retrieve the dagger. She put the tip to his lips, and he kissed it again, without her biding him to do it. She nicked his lip in the center, then leaned in to kiss him again and say, into his bloody mouth, "I ought to cut your tongue out. Then you would tell me no more lies."
"Ah," said Richard, "But then I could do nothing else with my tongue, besides talk."
"I get little benefit from either," said Anne, dryly, "Being dead." She put the knife to the seam of his doublet, at the edge of his bared breast, and slashed through the fastenings, opening it. Then with a second pass, she opened his shirt with the knife. In the dream, his clothing fell away thus opened, like smoke melting aside.
Richard was standing very still. Well, she had slapped him and screamed at him and on one memorable occasion lashed out at him with a horsewhip, but she had never actually used a knife on him in their marriage. The living Anne had not been quite that bold.
"Well?" Anne said to him. They were no longer in the street where he had courted her - if you could call it that - but in some nebulous dream place. She wanted to sit down and when she moved back she found there was some convenient piece of furniture to allow it. She drew her skirts up and spread them around her. "You were telling me I had some reason not to cut your tongue out, Richard."
Richard's murderous eyes were full of something that might have been hatred, or hunger, or lust, or love. He came to her, and he knelt before her.
Richard had always been good with his tongue - too good by half. He buried his face in her legs and sucked on the place where her lips met, making Anne gasp and wind her hand in his hair. They might have been in her bedchamber at home. She might have been alive. Richard licked from her entrance to the top of her cunt, sucking and making Anne's hips jolt forward. He brought his hands up, cupping her thighs and holding her to his face as he kissed her, and she melted backward onto the chair, fingers twined loosely in his hair, thinking wistful, half-formed thoughts about Richard's coming death.
Perhaps he would not be ended. Perhaps some bitter hate - whatever had made him as he was - would hold him together and to life as Anne had been held, and they would be damned together. She thought of that - wandering the earth with Richard, both of them dead and beyond further harm, with an eternity to settle her lust and her anger - and Richard pulled her hips forward onto his face, and Anne found her release, shuddering against him, hands tight once more on his hair.
Richard straightened then, and rose over her, unfastening his breeches. He paused, then, perhaps, at last, considering shame; perhaps only afraid that she would come up with some new way of tormenting him in the dream. "Come here," Anne said, impatient. "I do like your cock - better than the rest of you, often."
"You've said that before, too," said Richard, but he knelt between her legs and her spread skirts. He thrust into her, and Anne lifted a hand to stroke the drying blood on his breast. He had, she thought, a nice body, shuddering as he filled her with his cock. The muscles of his chest rippled under her hand. Well, she had had a nice body, once upon a time. All things died.
He leaned forward and buried his face in her neck. Anne brought her knees up around his hips, groaning. She had heard it said that many men made love like they made war. Well, it was true of Richard, too: with his silver, lying tongue, with subtlety one minute, and the next telling you who he was so plainly you wondered if you were mad that no one else saw it, too. His weight on her was a memory of her life, of their marriage, such as it had been. She missed life - the sunlight on her eyes and skin, food in her mouth, the fresh air in lungs that needed to breathe. She missed him, too: the smell of his hair and skin, the slyness of his comments at the table or in bed. Her body might only be a memory, but it knew him, knew his rhythm, and she pulsed with him, breath racing, her heart in her throat.
She came to her release a second time before Richard spilled himself inside her, and kissed her at the same time. His mouth was still bleeding. She sucked on his lip, before they broke the kiss and he lay, shuddering, over her.
"Oh, Richard," Anne said, almost fondly, lifting her fingers from his hair. "Think of me, tomorrow in the battle... Despair, and die."