“Behold, Madam Ghost,” Bram said, his voice cold and cutting as a shard of ice. “I call this Portrait of Folly.”

She continued to stare at this other Bram, this inchoate form. He held himself with such confidence, assured that whatever he desired would be his. His eyes were bright and clear, looking into a future of gallantry and daring, a boy dreaming of tomorrow. He had seen nothing of the world. Not yet.

No scar marred his throat. He was unmarked.

“Not folly,” she said. “Hope.”

“Ridiculous hopes. Other younger sons went into the military, and in that, I was no different. But I was singular in that I truly believed I’d do some good. I didn’t want to spend my military career doing useless drills and showing off my uniform in town. When they told us we’d be going to the Colonies to defend our people, I was happy.” He spit out the word. “Thought I would make a difference.”

“You did. I have seen it. Those people on the frontier, you defended their homes. There are scores of lives you saved.”

He made a dismissive wave with his free hand. “Token gestures. Nothing could keep pace with the spill of blood.”

“All of it meant something.”

Turning to her, his mouth twisted in a sneer. “Ned Davies would argue otherwise.”

“Ned . . . ?”

“He’s here.” He tapped his forehead.

Memories began to engulf her, swirling around her in a misty vortex. The chamber receded, fading, transforming into a muddy hill. The scent of gunpowder hung thick in the air, as did the groans of dying men and horses. Atop the hill stood a military fortress, its walls made of felled trees as though hastily constructed. Part of the walls had been blasted away. The yard within the fortress held more wounded men and bodies.

Outside the fortress, soldiers in red picked their way through the fallen.

“Find all the wounded,” said a blood and smoke-streaked Bram to the soldiers. “Bring them to the surgeon.”

“He looks fair gone.” One soldier lifted the shoulders of a man upon the ground, his head lolling back to reveal an ugly wound in his shoulder. If he lived, the injured soldier would of a certain lose his arm.

“Does he breathe?” Bram demanded.

The soldier bent close to the wounded man. “Aye, sir.”

“Then there’s a chance for him. Get him to Dr. Balfour.”

After signaling for some assistance, the soldier and one of his comrades bore the wounded man away, toward the fortress. Bram continued to move through the bent and contorted shapes of fallen men, his face ashen, lips pressed tight. Yet he appeared familiar with the aftermath of battle and the sight of the dead. He waved away clouds of flies from the face of a dead boy holding a drum.

“What of this one, sir?”

Bram turned at Sergeant Davies’s question. Bram outranked the Cornishman, not only in rank but station. Back in England, they would have had little to do with one another, Bram being the second son of a baron, Davies being the fifth son of a farmer, yet in the strange methods of war, they had become unlikely friends. They told one another stories of home and laughed raucously at remembered childhood exploits. He’d had no idea that a farmer’s boy could be just as reckless and foolish as a baron’s supplementary heir.

The other officers did not care for Bram’s fraternization with an enlisted man, but it seemed even war could not dim his insistence for doing whatever he damn well wanted.

Now Davies stood over a fallen French soldier, the enemy moaning weakly. One of his legs was nothing but tatters, taken off inelegantly by cannon fire.

The battle had been a rough one, with losses heavy on both sides. Bram had witnessed many of his brothers in arms killed, including men with families, and men who weren’t men, but boys who hadn’t grown a single whisker or been between the thighs of a woman. These were the fellow soldiers who, only the day before, talked longingly of their mother’s elderberry preserves, or cleaned their muskets and whistled. Now they were carcasses.

“The Frenchman goes to Dr. Balfour, too,” said Bram.

Davies looked hesitant. “You sure? I saw ’im gut Fitzhugh with a bayonet. Just tore ’im open, innards spilling out. Made me lose my tea and hardtack, it did.”

A wave of nausea threatened Bram’s struggle for composure. Evisceration was no way to die, slow and brutal. “We won’t leave him out here to be picked at by crows.” He’d seen too many men, still breathing, torn apart by scavengers.

Davies shrugged. “You’re the officer.”

The sergeant bent down to pick up the wounded enemy soldier. As he did, the Frenchman lifted his hand. He held a pistol. And aimed it at Davies’s face.

“Davies!” Bram shouted. He ran toward them.

Too late. The French soldier pulled the trigger. A flash and bang, and the pistol fired directly between an astonished Davies’s eyes. Most of his face blew apart.

Bram was there in an instant, his sword drawn and ready to run the Frenchman through. But the soldier denied him the pleasure, toppling back to the mud, dead.

Davies also lay in the mud, his arms outflung, his one remaining eye staring at the cloud-smeared sky. What was left of his face held a look of almost comic surprise. As other soldiers came running, Bram sank down to the sodden earth and could not look away from the fallen Davies, burning the image into his mind and heart.

The field covered with the dead vanished. As did the overcast sky, the ravaged fortress. Livia found herself once more in the elegant but unused chamber in Bram’s home, the bodies of the soldiers now pieces of furniture, the muddy ground turned to patterned carpets. Bram wore a robe instead of his uniform, but the expression on his face was the same. As though he’d torn the heart from his own chest and stared at it, clutched in his hand.

“For nothing,” Bram growled. “Ned Davies died for naught. The battle was over, the Frenchman was to have been given medical attention. Ned got his brains blown out anyway.”

Hollowed by his grief, she looked away. “I cannot pretend to know the whys and wherefores of combat. In my time, men fought and died simply for the amusement of the crowd.”

“In my time, men fight and die for many reasons, none of them worthwhile. There’s only death, and more death. That stupid boy”—he nodded toward the portrait of himself—“was an ignorant child. The only thing he achieved was the fashioning of the man standing here. And that’s a piss-poor accomplishment.”

“Nothing has been decided,” she fired back. “For over a millennium, I have seen this world change, constantly remaking itself. Until our bodies become the food of worms, we’ve the means of transforming ourselves. We might be anything we want. Anything at all.”

His jaw tightened. “Including those that would take up a futile fight against the Devil.”

“Winnable, unwinnable—all that matters is the fight.” She drifted closer, wishing she could touch him, though she didn’t know if she wanted to gently stroke his face or strike him. Any means of reaching him within the depths of his self-constructed crypt.

Gaze bleak, he turned away. “No.”

She darted through him, passing through his body, to stand in his line of sight. She pointed to the painting. “That boy was ignorant, yes, but he believed. That belief still dwells within you.”

“Don’t you understand?” He bared his teeth like an animal. “Men went to war. Some were killed. Others maimed. And others returned home and took up their lives. Not me. I was never strong enough. I came back broken.”

He stepped nearer so only a few inches separated them. Though she could feel nothing, some vestige of his heat penetrated the mists surrounding her, the first hint of sensation she’d had in over a thousand years.

“I see the world going to hell all around me,” he rumbled. “I know what will come. But I cannot fight anymore. If I ever possessed honor and virtue—which I doubt—they are long gone.”