Even if I wanted a closer connection with my husband, I knew it was selfish and put so much at risk, not to mention how much it would upset Io. I wanted to be strong. To do what was required of me.
A voice inside me whispered that maybe Ahyana had a point: If I really was fated to die, then I wouldn’t be able to save Locris anyway. Wouldn’t it be better to have a few days or weeks of happiness with him than not ever having it at all?
I hated how torn I felt. I reminded myself that there wasn’t a future here—things would end with us one way or another. The problem was all rational thought fled when he was near.
It had been easier before, when I’d been using anger to drive a wedge between us. I wasn’t sure how to hold on to my resolutions without it.
But I was done with being mad all the time, so I would have to find another way.
I decided to begin by making plans for myself. Perhaps if I stayed busy, it would help. Xander had already told me that he would take me to see Lysimache tomorrow. I wanted to be prepared—I would be going into a kind of battle—so I started braiding my hair.
Xander came into the room and I got a brief glimpse of his bare chest in my mirror. I didn’t allow myself to look at him and tried to focus on my hair. I’d never been as good at this as Quynh was. And knowing that my husband was mostly naked behind me was not helping me to concentrate.
The strands kept slipping through my fingers and I had to restart an embarrassing number of times.
“Do you need help?” Xander asked, and it startled me. I was usually so aware of where he was and what he was doing—how had I not realized that he’d come to stand directly behind me?
“You know how to braid hair?”
“I do.”
Send him away,I told myself.Tell him you don’t need help.The very last thing I needed was those marvelous fingers of his running through my hair.
Instead of doing the wise thing, I opted, again, for the selfish one. “I do need help. Thank you.”
“How many braids?”
“Three, one in the middle and one on each side, and then braid them all together in the back.”
I had to stifle a moan when he pressed his fingers against my scalp to separate out strands. He took to his task quickly and I forced myself to pay attention to what he was doing instead of focusing on how amazing it felt. The intimacy of this moment was overwhelming.
He was quick and efficient, which shouldn’t have surprised me. His braids were smooth and even and tight against my head.
My husband really was good at everything he did. “How do you know how to do this?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.
“It’s very simple and doesn’t take much to learn. You just need to practice.”
The anger that I’d tried to banish wanted to rise, accompanied by jealousy. That ugly monster inside me wanted to roar and demand that he tell me who else’s hair he had braided.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took in a calming breath. I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I wouldn’t jump to the worst possible conclusion.
If I couldn’t master the desire I felt for him, at the very least I could control my anger and stop letting it rule me.
He immediately made me glad that I’d made that choice when he said, “I used to do this for Io. The women from my mother’s nation always braided their hair at night, and our mother would do that for Io. After she died Erisa was trying very hard to curry favor with my father and wanted to braid Io’s hair. Io would scream and wouldn’t allow her to do it. Erisa forbade any of the servants from helping and I was the only one who could do it without risking bodily harm. So I braided her hair every night for years until she could do it herself.”
He was only a few years older than Io. I imagined him as a little boy, as I’d seen him in our shared dream, dedicating himself to learning how to braid his sister’s hair to comfort her and make her feel loved, and a swelling of warmth filled my heart.
I looked at his reflection. “Erisa did inflict bodily harm on you.”
“It’s only a scar,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror.
And I thought about how the scar on his face was just one of so many. His life had been full of scars, one after another, piling up on top of each other so that it was a marvel he was still moving forward, still striving.
A lesser man might have crumbled under the weight of it. He was so strong.
I felt guilty that I had inflicted some scars on him as well.
“Tie,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize that he’d completed the first braid and needed something to finish it off with. I opened a drawer and pulled out some twine, handing one length of it to him and keeping extra strands for the others.
