“No.” I cut him off. “No, no one in this house has treated me as anything but your wife. Except for you.” The pain in those words was so foolish, when this was a talk that needed so very much to happen. “You act as if I’ll always be here, but you know I’m here only as someone they think might belong to you. You know that to stay, I have to marry someone.” I pulled in a breath. “But you have made it clear over and over that you don’t want to marry me.”
“It isn’t that.” He flinched. “It isn’t. I…” He balled his fists as his sides. “I want you to have the time to make a choice.”
“What choice? Do you want me to interview your friends,see if there’s some other prospect? If you’re trying to push me off on someone you can tell me?—"
“Not that kind of choice.” His voice rasped. “A choice whether you want…” He stopped. We stared at each other. “...whether you want to live with the Drashik,” he finished, looked away again. “I don’t want you to be trapped. You could…go back.”
To the city. To the place I’d burned.
“No,” I said, and I was a little surprised to find no question in it. “I don’t want to go back. I could steal for a living, but…everything I’d hoped to still find there…it burned. I burned with it.” And suddenly I couldn’t look at him.
“I promised you a place with my people,” he said. “I promised you my protection, and my strength. And my friends…they are your friends too. I hope you see that.”
I nodded.
“But you shouldn’t have to go to my bed for that, Rowena.” The emotion in his voice broke through.
And I had to say something now, because his head was in his hands again, and I was holding his bowl, just stupidly standing there with his bowl. “But that’s what husbands and wivesdo. You can’t…let me make decisions and bring me into your house and never touch me.”
“Nayah, I can.” His throat tightened. “That isn’t even special. How many people don’t come together because one is injured, because the woman has had a baby or she’s bleeding, or…or someone is ill? It’s not special to be able to hold back. I’ve told you I’m not an animal, and I’m not. It’s only…” He hesitated. “I can live past my error. I can do right by you and live in a home and let us be…merely friends. Friends with a debt.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “But to swear a lie at the stones…” He raked, again, his fingers through his hair.
“The stones,” I repeated. “The stones are sacred to you.”
He nodded. His eyes were still closed.
“And to marry me by orc standards, you have to…tell the stones that we’ll make love?”
“Something like that.” His voice was raw.
“But we have. We…we did.”
His neck was red. “I know. But not…” He grimaced. “...not by orc rites.”
“You have a ritual for lovemaking.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. By the window, Hagmar snorted, settled.
“A lifetime of celibacy cannot be appealing to you.” I was speaking at a whisper, hushed. He didn’t look at me.
“It’s hardly the worst thing that can happen.”
“You wereseekingto get married. You were marrying younger than the rest of your friends.Mostof them are unmarried.” This was so pointless. That I was arguing this at all was pointless.
“Yes.”
“So you married meexpectingto have sex with me.”
“Yes.”
“And probably also at the sex stones, right?”
“That’s not important.”
“But it is something you wanted, in your life. It isn’t…you weren’t planning to be a monk. You were planning to be a husband.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
My heart guttered in my chest.
