“What about you? Just the kithara?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s mentioned it,” he said, expression dimming a little.
Before he could get lost in that thought, I took his left hand andwrapped it around my wrist at the approximate position he’d press the strings on a lute.
“Listen. Everyone knows this song. See if your hands know the music.”
Lixnea’s priests were playing one of my favorites. It wasn’t some great epic, just a sweet and silly song about an actor who prayed to the Moon for the ability to change his appearance onstage but forgot his own face afterwards. He came home with his landlord’s eyebrows, his baker’s nose, and his neighbor’s beard, but his wife knew him anyway.
I waited for Taran to press the shapes of the chords onto my skin, but after a moment, his fingers slipped down to my hand. I gave him a startled glance when he gently traced the scar a ragged plectrum had left with the tip of his thumb, but he was intent on his study.
I had a maiden-priest’s hands. Slender and strong, but scrubbed ruthlessly clean and flecked all over from encounters with snapped strings, stray cinders, and broken mortal bones. Taran held the one with his ring on it—I knew I should take it off, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it.
“Do you remember anything? Anything at all?” I asked softly. Several times he’d already said he didn’t, but I still hoped that wasn’t true.
“Before I died? No.” He didn’t look up as the warm pad of his thumb dipped up and down across my knuckles. He let his fingers rest in the hollows between my own, marking their size against my smaller hand. The weight of his hand resting in mine made my stomach tighten with yearning.
“But there are a few things I just…know,” he added after a moment.
I didn’t want to put as much hope into that statement as myheart urged me to, but if Marit could still feel the well water around him, why couldn’t Taran feel his hand in mine? He didn’t elaborate, leaving me to dream that some part of him found this familiar.
He pulled his fingers from mine to rest on my wrist, thumb brushing the fragile skin over my pulse, which quickened at the tiny intimacy. When I didn’t squirm away, he lifted my palm to rest against his upper arm, and we sat back like that. As delicately as I’d replace a baby bird in the nest, he shifted so that my head fell onto his shoulder.
I let the wine and the music slide through me, and my eyelids grew heavy as the night stretched on. Nobody sought us out, though Taran drew some speculative glances from the dancers who passed by. Moments of peace had not been so common in my past few years that I needed anything more than the comfort of Taran’s warm, solid form next to me and the beauty of the music to feel content, but his energy was more restless.
He let go of my hand to sit up and refill both our glasses from one of the open carafes on the table. I took mine but didn’t drink—I was feeling a little fuzzy already.
“If you’re not going to sing again, do you want to go back to my room?” Taran asked with his voice nearly obscured in his cup.
“Why?” I asked with complete innocence.
I didn’t catch his meaning until he gave me a wide, slow smile, eyes brightening with delight at my naive response.
“I need your help reaching something on a low shelf,” he drawled, trying to pull my hand onto his arm when I turned my shoulders to frown at him. I did know what people left parties to do in bedrooms, at least in theory; I just hadn’t expected him to ask when he never had before.
I would have been very easy to seduce—from the beginning, even. It had been my first time out of the strictures of Wesha’s temples, I was terrified and alone with the burden of leadership, andTaran had been everything I could have wanted. I used to lie awake cataloging the times he’d smiled at me that day.
And once we were betrothed—well, he could have had me by crooking the least little finger. I loved him to distraction. It wouldn’t have taken words. It could have been a look, a hand pulling me toward his bed. I would have gone. I had been waiting for our wedding night not to keep Wesha’s favor but because he’d seemed to expect I would prefer to wait, and I didn’t want to disappoint his idea of me.
Well, there was nobody but me to care what I did now.
What had felt like respect for the vows I nearly made to Wesha now felt like another mistake. Why had I never pulled him away from the firelight and asked him to demonstrate some of that eternal devotion he was always professing? Was he actually indifferent to me, or would it have felt too dishonest to cross that line? I didn’t think I’d feel any more betrayed than I did now if I’d left the three years I loved him with a better idea of what two people did when they left a party hand in hand.
There was a little power in having these particular regrets in this situation though. I crossed my arms, let my glass sit loosely in my hand, and considered him with lowered eyelids.
“Why?” I asked again. “No, really—tell me.”
If this was just another priestly duty he expected me to attend to, I’d dump my entire glass of wine in his lap and leave, but Taran was rarely direct about what he wanted, so the casual way he’d asked made me think there was more to it.
If anything, he seemed flustered by my challenge. He tilted his head, gaze hanging on my lips when I took another sip from my glass.
“I’d like to see what your hair looks like when it’s down and loose,” he said after a moment, voice a shade raspy.
I waited for more. Surely, after three hundred years, he couldmanage better. I knew I wasn’t beautiful, but I had to have a few charms worth listing.
When I quirked one eyebrow at this lack of effort, his cheeks colored, but he didn’t amend his response, which made me wonder if he’d neglected to lie out of sheer surprise that I hadn’t stormed off.
So I shrugged. “Alright,” I said, and set my cup down so that I could pull the pins out of my hair. For the party I’d done a more complicated style, arranged like a double crown on the top of my head, and it took a few minutes to get enough pins out so that my braids fell over my chest. His eyes widened but held mine when I took out the ties and carded my fingers all the way to the roots. When it was all loose, I bent my head and shook the dark red strands out so they fell around my shoulders. Even crimped from the braids, my hair brushed my thighs, shining in the lantern light. There.
