“She is not a punishing goddess. Even I, her newest convert, know this.” I reached out and tugged on the elbow of his undershirt. “Come back to bed with me. We have perhaps two hours of sleep ahead of us if we leave now.”
He looked up at me and gave that little exhale through his nose that no one else would have noticed, but I saw as his reluctant laugh. “Sleep sounds good.”
We returned to the room and in the dim light through the slit on one side of the animal tarp over one of the windows, I kicked off my boots, undid the hastily done stays on my dress and pulled it over my head, ignoring the tangle of the nightgown around my waist, near to exposing my sex.
If he saw, he saw.
I walked to my side of the bed in a hurry, yanking back the covers and climbing in. “And you did this on such a cold morning too!” I said as if we had been carrying on a conversation all the way from the temple. “Why be penitent now?” I pulled the covers up to my nose.
The weight of his body dipped his side of the bed slightly and he said, “I should have felt this conviction after The Rush of Flowers. Or The Gleaming.” He pulled the covers up around his head too and then he said, “I have not prayed in the temple in so long.”
“Why did you stop? The Procurer trials?” I yawned, grateful for the semi dark so he could not see the funny face I made when I did so.
“You,” he said.
“Me?”
“I did not want to disturb you.”
“Why would your prayer have disturbed me?”
He shifted to fully face me now, though I could barely make out his face. “You did not choose this marriage. Or this country. Or this faith. I thought I would at least let you have her. She has been a comfort to me. After my mother’s death and… other grief. I thought you might not be able to seek that comfort as easily if your unwanted husband was near.”
The distant sounds of a horse’s hooves on stone filtered through the window, along with the shouts of several men. The city was waking. Fisherman would soon be returning from their morning hauls. Outside, so many people were leading their lives. Inside, was this onion man. And he had just peeled back one of his layers for me.
“Do you know what I think about you, Alric Angler?” I asked eventually.
“No. What do you think of me…Edith Angler?”
The idea of my formal first name now coupled with his last name was welcome, but the sound ofhimsaying it was better than any love song.
“I think,” I began, “shortly after our wedding you were mistaken when you declared that you did not know how to be a husband.”
“Everything I know I have learned from my wife,” he said.
“Oh, her. That old scold.”
“She does scold. Sometimes.”
“I’m sure she means well. What are the other books on your desk? And will you read those to me too? I liked your poetry.”
He stretched his legs under the covers and said, “Dull accounts of land and battle. I can get us other books. What do you want?”
“I don’t want you to spend any—”
He interrupted me. “Edith. What kind of books?”
“I know they are expensive here. I will listen to you read dull accounts of land and battle,” I protested, but when he remained quiet, I said, “I like stories.”
“Then I will get us stories. But you have to read to me too.”
A few days after that, I awoke to an empty bed and a pile of three new books on the desk. One was another volume of poetry. I did not recognize the poet but I liked what I read as I flicked through it, my thumb stopping on a poem entitled ‘How Long Until You See Your Love,’ in which the poet bids his beloved to see him as a suitor. I shut the book quickly and picked up the second, about a group of boys who search for their lost brother in the wilds of Nyossa. I shut that book too, another reminder of my bones’ final resting place. Was that why I had liked the forest so much? Had a part of me known I would be returning soon? The third book was titled ‘The Warrior’s Lady.’ It seemed to be about a woman trying to run her husband’s estate while he was at war. It reminded me of the stories we had poured over in Eccleston, looking for heroines that inspired us.
We spent more fall evenings reading aloud to each other. I would ready for bed early and be in it when he retired to our room, fresh from a bath after a day of Procurer feats of strength, none of which I understood. Wine or whiskey was offered to me and poured for us by him. I would sit watching the firelight flicker over his face as he read, seated in the desk chair. We lit a fire in the grate now, the evenings taking on a biting cold that only the noon sun could eliminate, but the days grew darker and cooler, little by little giving way to what would be Tintar’s winter, a short, awful squall of a season. Wintry winds beat at the animal tarpaulins in the night, but we did not notice, comforted by liquor and literature.
I chose the story about the boys first as I felt the other two could perhaps be dangerous.
“It is your turn,” he reminded me one night, pouring my tin cup half full of whiskey.
