“I said don’t move, Edith.”
I returned to laying on my back, looking up at him.
He drained the tin cup and set it on the desk, laying his tunic on the back of the chair. Then, from his side, he crawled across that large bed towards me, eyes on my form. When he reached me, he buried his face in my belly and inhaled deeply, as if trying to reach my skin through the cotton shift.
I lay as motionless as I could, my pulse in my ears.
“Whydo you always smell so good?” he whispered into me. “I cannot get the scent of you out of my nose. Even when I am surrounded by unwashed men and mud and horses. It remains with me.”
He had lain down on his stomach, feet dangling off of his side of the bed, using me as his pillow for his head. His left hand had buried itself under my back and come up around my waist and his right arm was wrapped around my right thigh.
Unsure of what to do, I continued to lay there. I opened my mouth to ask if he wanted to get under the covers or if he wanted the room to change, but he kept speaking.
“And you own all the colors too. Gray makes me think of your eyes. When I eat hazelnuts, I think of your hair when I crack their shells. I feel like every meal has a bowl of hazelnuts on the table now. Blue makes me think of your tattoos. And those three lines of ink you put on your faces before we entered the chapel. And your flower crown. Green makes me think of your clothes, white of your ridiculous priest’s robes, pink of your mouth. Red now makes me think of you sitting in that field with blood on your face. You looked so proud of yourself. And I was proud of you, but was I furious. Gods, woman, yellow is the only safe place and I hate the color.” He spoke every word into the skin below my navel, but I could make out exactly what he said.
My husband was drunk and I was happy. I reached out a hand and placed it on the back of his head.
He made a noise of contentment.
“I think you need to sleep,” I said, but he was already close to slumber and so I joined him. The next day I woke alone as I so often did. I wondered what he had thought, once sobered, upon waking with his head on my belly and his arms around my waist and thigh. I wondered if I should ask after him when I saw him next, but decided against it. I myself did not know what to think of such speech and conduct from such a man as Alric. Did he lust after me the way I lusted after him? Had he, like me, only recently admitted it to himself? Was I reckless to hope?
63. Considering
The mural in the throne room was coming along impressively. Tarpaulins were spread out along the floor, the seats for lords, the throne and over the shark skeletons for protection. Using ladders, Helena and Maureen had painted the majority of the bluff rock around the room in swirls of black, green and blue tufted with sprays of white foam. Light gray shark fins dotted the stormy sea. In more subtle swirls of dark green, they had added the outlines of mermaids, darting amongst the waves. Above the sea, a cloudy sky had been painted with bits of sunlight streaking through the clouds, the white mixed with the vermilion and yellow ochre.
“The king is very pleased,” Maureen sang at me when I entered, my black cotton dress and apron ready for the messy work of mixing pitch.
“He is,” agreed Helena. “But now he wants us to add a warship.”
“And,” added Maureen, “the prince wants us to paint other parts of the keep now.”
I sat next to Helena, mixing the bucket of slaked lime with water and salt, my arm cramping. But I continued to work the paddle around until Helena said it was the correct consistency. The two of them daubed it onto palettes with pastes made from azurite, malachite and verdigris and began to add more froth and foam to the tips of waves. I was given a small cup of white and a fine paintbrush and I added little dots to whatever wave they directed me towards. We spent the day in this way and it was peaceful. In the late afternoon, Helena asked me to stand next to her, adding my dots to the section she was working on.
“You don’t need to add any white,” she said in a lower voice.
“Then why am I standing here?” I asked, poised with the brush.
“Because I kissed Caleb last night and I want to tell you about it.”
“Who is Caleb?”
“It is my betrothed’s first name and he asked me to use it.”
I looked at her, expertly swishing her brush over the rock wall. “So tell me about it.”
She looked over at Maureen, who was humming to herself, eyes intent on her work. “He was inebriated. I had to use the privy before bed, so I did and when I was on my way back and he spotted me from your hallway, across the landing and he stalked over to me and said ‘please for the love of the gods, kiss me,’ and I said, ‘go on then’ and I just sort of stood there.”
“And?”
She looked at Maureen again and back to me. “I am considering sharing his bed.”
“How unladylike of you, Helena.”
She smiled into her work. “He is completely not my kind of man. He is wild. I mentioned that I liked to read once and he told me he only learned to read because Alric made him learn. He has the foulest mouth on him too.”
“And you want to marry him.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
