He was blessedly silent, and she hoped he would remain silent on the subject for the next four to five days. But he was right. She smelled. The first two days were going to be the heaviest, and the cell would soon be filled with the intense, copper smell of her blood. She blushed and groaned in both pain and mortification. If the guards would at least put her back in her cell, so she could free-bleed in peace…
Ripping sounds reached her ears, and she tilted her head to listen. What was Rune doing now? She wanted to ask him, but her current situation made her feel so deeply ashamed that she found she couldn’t talk to him. Striking up a conversation, asking him what he was doing, which would probably lead to them talking about random things again... She couldn’t. Not today. She just wanted to hide in the dark and pretend like she didn’t exist, and he didn’t exist, and the prison was just a bad dream she would soon wake up from.
More ripping sounds. Then she heard him move over the floor, tentatively approaching her. She stilled. She felt something touch her hand, and she instinctively let go of the iron bar to bat him away, but he took advantage of that to press something soft into her open palm.
“What–”
He quickly moved away, putting distance between them.
“I didn’t look at your face,” he said. “I had my eyes closed.”
She squeezed the thing in her hand and realized what it was. A neat stack of cotton strips.
“What did you do?” she asked. “Did you just tear your shirt to pieces?”
“Only the sleeves.”
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She didn’t know what to say. Rune had just ripped the sleeves of his shirt and made cloths for her. Men didn’t even understand menstruation, didn’t care to know how women dealt with it, but this man here, who was sharing a prison cell with her and always made it a point to respect her wishes and not look at her face, had destroyed his own shirt so she wouldn’t have to bleed in her dress.
“You’ll–” she choked on her words. “You’ll be so cold now.”
“I told you, the cold doesn’t bother much.”
Right. The cold didn’t bother him, he could climb over the city wall like it was just a warm-up exercise, and he could bend iron. And he was kind. He was the kindest, most selfless man she’d ever met, and she would’ve cried right now, except she couldn’t. She swallowed a sob and shuffled around, her hands going under her skirt to slip a few strips between her legs. She kept the rest safe by placing them inside her blouse, flush against her breast.
“Come back under the blanket,” he said.
“No, I stink.” She inhaled sharply. She really didn’t want to talk about this.
“You don’t.”
She was cold, and that only made her cramps worse. She swallowed a whimper and eventually gave in and crawled toward him, all the while keeping her head down and her long hair over her face. He made space for her on their straw mat and covered her with the blanket when she lay down.
“If I keep my eyes closed, is it all right if I turn around?”
How could she say no to him? He’d just done for her what no man would’ve done for no woman. Not in the year 1818.
“Sure.”
She knew that he could tell she was in pain. Her menses had always been cripplingly painful, to the point where she would take a break from her duties at the academy and tell Matteo that she was down with the flu. She’d lock herself up in her room and suffer in silence. At least it only happened once every two months. Sometimes, three months would pass without her bleeding. She was terribly irregular, and perhaps that was why it was so agonizing when it happened.
Rune kept a few inches between them. She could feel the warmth of his body radiate toward her, and his breath graze the back of her neck. For a few minutes, he didn’t move. Then, she felt the most tentative fingers thread through her hair. He only touched the ends of it, but she could feel the gentle movement pull at her roots soothingly. She let out a sigh.
“Is this all right?”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“Does it help you feel better?”
“Yes, slightly.”
He ran his fingers through her hair, over and over, combing it meticulously, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been touched so tenderly. Matteo hadn’t really touched her at all, and Briar was harsh when showing her love. Seraphina came from a family of purists, so even in her childhood, there wasn’t a lot of physical contact. Her mother was a cold woman. Almost as cold as this cell.
Rune started humming in the back of his throat. She listened to him for a while. She didn’t recognize whatever he was singing, but it seemed to be intentional, to have a rhythm.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Just something I wrote. Sometimes I turn my poems into songs. It passes the time.”
