After vows were exchanged and the newly wedded couple said their goodbyes from the reception, Tethys sat before the nickel mirror in her washroom.
“Tethys, the night isn’t getting any younger,” Procyon’s thick voice, hoarse from drunken laughter, called from the other room.
Her stomach lurched. Once they’d exchanged their binding rings and the feast began, a dread sank like a stone to the pit of her stomach. She knew the marriage customs, and yet somehow she hadn’t prepared herself for what awaited outside that door. Although not unfamiliar with the marital act, Tethys’s palms sweat at the thought.
Procyon requested this marriage as a strategy to end the bloodshed between Canissa and Venia. Tensionbetween the two mortal realms was always high—the ancients suggested perhaps the divide came when their two primordial lovers fell. Their descendant mortals declined into madness without the guiding tether to divine sires.
During the dark ages of Canissaen and Venian history, the two realms bloodied themselves in barbaric warfare. Not until the birth of their new patron gods did they enter a period of detente—opening a diplomatic line of communication, establishing necessary trade routes, and performing as substantial participants in society.
Tensions rose to their boiling point again, however, when an eastern hunting party strayed too far over the border years ago. The debrief of what ensued after those innocent men and women lost their lives over a handful of wolf pelts fueled the fire between the mortal peoples once more. Old wounds oozed again, and the Venian council—swift to point their fingers at a nearby Canissaen hunting camp—planned their vicious retaliation. It wasn’t long before war ensued once more.
Although the shortest of wars, the Dance of Dawn and Dusk was the deadliest of all time, leaving both realms ransacked and their populations nearly extinct. And so, Obscuros was quick to agree, seeing the union as a strategic match to end the war and strengthen his godly bloodline.
The mortals relied on this union. If she were to gain their approval and that of her family along with it, she would keep quiet and obey. The wild, ever-stretching horizon would have to wait. Maybe in a thousand years, when the Dance of Dawn and Dusk was merely a sentence in the copyist’s historical texts, Tethys could disappear into its mystery.
Like a pig brought to market, Tethys was plumped,primped, pruned, and presented to her new husband.
This was for the best. This is right.
She sighed and undid the stiff pins in her hair. They gave her a headache hours ago. Now her temples throbbed with a much deeper sort of pain.
“I’ll only be a minute,” she called. Tethys wished with her entire body to freeze time. To stay in this moment of in-between. Tomorrow she’d be crowned Queen of the East and a treaty would be signed. It was an agreement upheld…so long as their marriage remained intact.
Over the last few months of marital counseling and extra lessons with Euda, she changed the way a tadpole became a frog. Slowly, but not without pains. No longer would she be Tethys, a carefree lady of court, who could slip to the gardens unnoticed. Just as during her wedding, all eyes were again on her. But unlike the processional, these eyes remained fixed until the end of time.
But she couldn’t freeze time. It would continue to move forward, with or without her. So she put on her battle armor and joined her new husband in the bed that was never meant to be shared.
† † †
When Procyon finally fell asleep, his sculpted chest rising and falling with the rhythm of a resting breath, Tethys rose from bed.
Her body ached.
He hadn’t been gentle, although she hadn’t expected him to be.
She still smelled of him, like a spiced autumn evening. In any other instances the scent might feel endearing, but tonight it slithered over her like a sickness laying waste to her skin.
She turned on the faucet in the bathing chamber and watched the steam meander through the cool night air.When the large copper clawfoot was full, she delicately dipped her feet in, letting the burning sensation run rampant over her toes. Maybe if the water was hot enough, it’d strip away his lingering touch from her skin.
Tethys winced as she sat beneath the water. It was more painful than she’d imagined it to be, even after she’d escaped to the furthest corner of her mind. She rubbed her scalp with primrose oils, hoping to scrub away the feeling of the headboard banging against it. With each stroke of the sponge she grew more desperate to be clean.
This body wasn’t her own. It was just another item on the list of things she’d sacrificed today. A sob escaped her lips before she could silence it. The pieces of herself she desperately held together came undone, and everything shattered around her.
Tethys needed space where her walls closed in. She needed oxygen where the bathing oils stifled the air. Today was a turning point. Just as Euda said in their lessons time and time again, a leader decides what of themselves to abandon before coming into power.
In her case, Tethys wasn’t given the choice of what she held safe and what she let go.
She dressed quickly in a clean nightgown and snuck past her sleeping husband to the balcony overlooking the back gardens.
The moonlight cast shadows of large manicured hedges and bristling shrubs. Rows of lilac trees lined the far edge of the property, their blooms now a pale shade of violet in the silvery starlight.
She closed her eyes, suddenly sick as she recalled his face so close to hers that the tips of their noses brushed. She was the embodiment of early spring, when new buds perked and babes exited the womb of their mothers. Whereas he was the patron of autumn, when leaves turned brown and the elderly souls left their mortal bodies. While she thrived in the light of new, budding life, he reveled inthe death of old, withered ones.
All life she embraced, he stole away.
She took the air in. Her lungs, at capacity with the bittersweet floral scent, craved more, as if the air cleansed them of the breath she’d shared with Procyon. The thoughts racing through her mind faded away, leaving a fragile vacancy she welcomed with open arms.
Here, in the cool night air, she could let it all go.
