“Don’t touch me!”I scream. My voice has never been more unmelodic, like a scrape of nails across bone. Taar withdraws, his face a mask of agony. I look at him through the wild strands of hair falling over my eyes. Part of me knows I must seem like a mad creature. Because that’s what I am. Mad, insane, my mind broken with grief, my soul mutilated.
“Hearttorn,” I whisper. Then I smile. “Torn to little ribbons of bloody flesh.”
“Ilsevel, I can help you,” Taar says softly. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now. But I will love you through this pain. I will comfort you, I will lay down my very life for—”
A high, manic laugh bursts from my lips. “Vel-sa almar. E luralmaidor-hath,” I sing harshly, without melody. “Is that what you mean, Taar?My life is yours, and, should you require it, my death.”
The sorrow in his face could break any heart not already ruined. “You know I mean it, my love. With everything I am.”
“Then why didn’tyoudie instead? Why didn’tyoudie and let Diira be spared?”
I could not wound him more deeply if I plotted his pain for a thousand years. I might as well have taken the knife from his belt and plunged it into his heart. Part of me wishes I could. The broken song in me is too wild, too screaming, and I don’t know how to exist. I don’t know how to love him through this loss. Wouldn’t loving him be dishonoring to Diira? Wouldn’t it be an unforgiveable sin to let myself be comforted and strengthened by that love, when Diira’s body lies broken, out there on that lonely plain beneath a hell-rent sky?
I cannot weep. Weeping would be too great a relief. I don’t deserve it. “I want you to let me go, Taar,” I say at last in a much calmer tone.
He releases a ragged breath. “Ilsevel, please—”
“I want you to let me go,” I repeat more firmly. “Unmake the vows. Do whatever it is you’re supposed to do and break thisvelra.I don’t want it. I don’t want you. I don’t want your damned world and all its damnable people. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
I can’t look at him. I turn away, unwilling to see whatever his eyes might reveal. Because it doesn’t matter. His feelings, his pain,are no longer my concern.
“Maybe I loved you,” I say, and shudder. My limbs feel so weak. I long to collapse on this bed and become stone. “Maybe I loved you. I don’t know. Maybe I just needed something from you. But whatever it was we shared between us, I don’t love you now. And I don’t want to. I want to go.”
He is silent for so long, the silence hurts. But when he speaks at last and breaks that silence, I almost hate him for it. “Where will you go?”
“How is that your concern?” I turn on him sharply, lips curled in a snarl. “I am not yours anymore. Do you understand me? Let me go. Break the bond andlet me go!”
Those last words emerge in a shriek of broken song, so rough, so hard, thedakathwalls shake, the support beams quake, and the skin walls flail as though caught in a high gale. Taar rises, takes several steps back, staring down at me. Thelicathano longer illuminates his face, but I feel the intensity of his gaze.
“Ilsevel,” he growls, “you break my heart.”
Why should I care? My heart is broken; his might as well be too. And if some still, small voice deep inside me tries to tell me this is wrong—that I do not want to cause him pain, that I love him still, that he deserves more than this—it’s too weak to make any difference in the storm of dissonance in my head. I simply don’t care.
“Let me go, Taar,” I say again in a voice of stone. “I foreswear all vows I ever made to you. I will be your wife no more.”
28
TAAR
In the end it’s so easy.
I would have thought, given the profound strength of thisvelra, that the breaking of it would require some degree of magic or sorcery. Some enspelled blade, perhaps, to sever the fibers which have so inextricably bound us these last weeks.
But when Ilsevel speaks those words, I can almost see it—the way the strands uproot from her chest, from that place where theruehnarmark burns beneath her bloodstained bodice. Like a tree toppling in a storm, they pull away, and the rootlets tear chunks of her spirit out as they come, leaving an ugly hole and a broken rune, none of which are perceptible to physical eyes.
I look down at my own chest. At theruehnarburning there, still so bright. Only now the burn is not a warming glow of certainty, but sharp pain. I feel the need to claw it away, to separate myself from it. Thevelrahangs limp, no longer connected. It does notuproot the way Ilsevel’s did. Instead it shrivels up to a little dried husk of a thing and is no more.
And I am empty. As though my heart has been scooped out and my chest cavity hollowed with hammer and chisel.
I turn from her without a word. Perhaps it is traditional for a disavowed husband to speak some final parting to his once-bride, but my lips are empty, my head ringing with the thunder of pounding blood. The pain is too great, the realization of what cannot be undone too all-consuming. I have failed her. I have failed to protect her, failed to honor the vows I made to her. In that failure I have proven myself no worthy husband.
She is well within her rights to reject me. To declare me unfit, an oath-breaker, an untrue mate. And so I must leave her now, as the dark ofsilmaelshields us from Nornala’s watching eye.
Somehow I find my way out from thedakathinto the cold night air. My heart pounds against the broken rune on my breast. I feel a sickness whirling in my veins—a sickness I recognize. The residual virulium, even now pulsing inside me, reminding me of everything it has to offer. The darkness, the bloodlust. The forgetfulness. Oh, what sweet oblivion is to be found within the Demon’s Kiss! A wild craving seems to come over me, the urge to mutilate and maim. It seems to me in that moment the only possible salve for this pain.
I breathe out slowly, eyes closed and fists clenched. Oh gods, spare me! Give me the strength to fight this hurt, to fight this burning urge! But with my eyes shut, I see Ilsevel’s face again. Hercoldness through which flashes of hatred may be briefly glimpsed.
I failed her.
