You blinked at me. “No,” you answered. “I will write that she gave everything—her sight, her youth, even her sleep—for her country.” You paused. “And that she is a lout and a wretch who doesn’t know how to say thank you.”
A long pause before I said, “Thank you.” Your teeth flashed, crookedly, and I added, “Keep to your own side of the fire.”
But you disobeyed me.
When I called out again—that night and on the nights that followed—you were always there, near enough to touch. You spoke to me sometimes, your voice so thin and splintered I was never sure if I heard the words or merely imagined them:Always,you whispered,I swear.
When I traveled alone, I kept to the wild edges of the country, where the wind rushed unhindered through the grass and the only people I met wereas wary and lonesome as I: vagabonds and brigands, thieves and poachers, the oathless and homeless. They neither loved me nor hated me, but only watched me carefully as I passed, like pine martens watching a hawk.
But you sat on a horse like a sack of swedes with legs, and I loved Hen too well to make him suffer your bouncing over rough country. The queen’s roads were smooth and fine, so we would ride straight through the heartland of Dominion, and I would bear the glares and whispers.
I would have passed through every croft as quickly as possible, but we hadn’t even made it through Farnvall before you’d charmed a pretty little baker’s daughter out of half her griddle cakes and directions to the nearest bathhouse.
I preferred to bathe in springs and streams—I did not care to be gawked at—but your face tipped up to mine, wistful and wind tousled, and very soon I found myself stepping into the warmish, sour water of a Farnvall tub.
It felt—good. Gooseflesh chased up my arms. The fist I made of my body unclenched, just slightly. I sighed a little, and heard you make a small, pained sound behind me.
I asked, without turning, “Did you seek a bath only for my sake? Was I so rank?”
There was a long pause, during which I recalled how carefully and ineffectively you held your body away from mine in the saddle, how far away you walked to piss. Modesty, perhaps, or distaste; the first time I’d gone to bed with Ancel he’d touched my shoulders, gingerly, and told me I was lucky he liked men, too. Maybe you preferred your women small and soft-bodied, like that pretty baker’s daughter.
I tilted my head against the wooden ledge and closed my eyes, firmly. I waited for the sound of the door closing behind you, the sting of it so clear in my mind it felt prophetic, preordained.
But instead I heard clothes hitting the floorboards, a faint splash. I slitted my eyes and caught the quick bronze flash of your limbs. You hunched yourself down into the water so that only your collarbones were visible. You ought to have hidden them, too, I thought; there was a pair of hollows right where the bones met the muscle of your shoulders, where my thumbs might fit perfectly.
You began to babble, of course, eyes bouncing comically from my breasts to my hair to the ceiling and back to my breasts. “Do—do men and women not bathe separately?” you asked, hoarsely. “I thought—”
I turned around to wash and your sentence ended on a sharp gasp. I feltyour eyes on my bare back like a pair of live coals, hot and hungry; I did not think you liked soft-bodied women, after all, though it shouldn’t have mattered to me. I stretched, purposefully, just to hear your breath catch.
But you did not reach for me. Instead, you washed yourself with frantic urgency and fled the room. I lingered for a while in the tepid gray water and let one hand slip between my legs, thinking of your collarbones and your long limbs and your quick, helpless gasp. I hardly lasted a minute; it was not easy, riding day after day with you in my lap.
By the time I emerged, damp and sated, you’d charmed all the laundresses into telling you stories about me, and your eyes met mine firmly, without wandering.
The same thing happened in the next town, and the one after. You were forever lingering and talking, charming the fishwives and gossiping with the stone masons’ sons. You had a way of lifting one shoulder and ducking your head that made you look younger than you were, though your face was canny as a crow’s.
“The Duel of the Stone Keep?” you would say, blinking those black doe’s lashes. “You say your cousin’s husband saw it all?”
And they would tell you everything they knew about me: rumors and slander; ballads they’d never heard properly and only half recalled; tales of heroes from far away and far before my time, which had been given to me like hand-me-down clothes; even the truth, or pieces of it. As we left each village you would badger me for my own account, and I would growl and glare, but in the end, I could resist you no better than the fishwives. I told you everything about everything—save the Black Bastion. I only rubbed the scar over my right eye when you asked, hard enough to hurt, and stared into the fire.
Later you would sit cross-legged by the coals, your hand moving back and forth across the book in your lap, and I would watch you with a jealous ache in my breast. I could tell from the look on your face you were half in love with her, this woman you were inventing. Sometimes when you looked at me your eyes would go hazed and warm, and I would wonder which of us you saw.
I did not take advantage of your confusion—I made my bed across the fire from yours and did not touch you except when I pulled you into the saddle each morning, or when you were taken by one of your shaking spells. Then I would wrap my arms around you and press your spine to my chest,holding fast until your breathing eased and your body slackened against mine.
I did not always let you go as quickly as I should have, afterward. Forgive me—a monster so rarely feels wanted.
We made it farther than I thought we would—to the very edge of the Northern Fallows—before you saw the truth of me.
We were passing through a gathering of hovels too mean even to be called a village, watched by thin, hateful faces. The last time I’d come north, I’d brought an army with me and left nothing behind but pyres and widows, and they had not forgotten it.
I didn’t blame them. Theirs was a just and pure hatred, which burned straight through the shine of my armor and found the butcher inside it. It was nearly a relief, to be cursed and spat at, after days of your hazy, stupid looks.
We would have passed through that place without incident, if only they’d contented themselves with insults and thrown swedes.
But then that fucking fool grabbed me by the hair.
I want you to understand that I intended to kill him. That I would have, or already had. In that moment I could feel the memory of his death in my nerves: the gristlingcrackof his vertebrae separating; the wet, hollow sound of his head—no, it was his hand, only his hand—striking the mud—
I blinked. My fist was around my hilt, but the sword was not fully drawn. The villager was not dead, or even injured.
