He’s there when I look up, and I’m not surprised. Whenever I think about him, he seems to be there. He crouches by the fire, and I pause to listen. No crunching of snow or scraping of twigs. He’s the one who was guarding the perimeter.
“What’s your name?” I ask him before I look up.
I see his feet shift position uncomfortably.
“Your given name,” I specify, looking up now to meet his red-rimmed eyes. He frowns at me. “I don’t know it, you see. You know I’m Iva Fitzroy. I know only that you are Sir Oakensen.”
He nods, swallows. “Haldur.”
His voice is rough. He’s hardly spoken these past days.
“Are you still Haldur now that she’s gone?” I ask him and our eyes meet.
He doesn’t guard his gaze. It opens his soul for me like the opening of a thick oak door. All the light and darkness of what lies behind seems to pour out toward me.
I don’t flinch from it. I meet it honestly with my own depths. And for this one moment, we share in something deeper than touch, deeper than the closest of intimacies. A moment where the quickening of one heart is matched exactly to the flow of the other, so that there is nothing separating the one from the other.
I see in his eyes the realization of it. I wet my dry lips and hold onto it for as long as I can.
“I don’t know,” he says, still looking deeply into my gaze as if he hopes to find the answer there. “But I will meet the demands of honor, still.”
I could drown in just this moment. Breathe it instead of air forever.
“I don’t think I will be Iva when I marry this fae king.”
I didn’t think his gaze could be any sadder, but it is, suddenly.
“But I will also do my duty,” I say and my voice breaks on duty.
He nods, subtly. We hardly need nods or words just now.
He leans forward and I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it. His lips part. And for a moment there’s a flash of something deep in his gaze, something agonizing and beautiful all at once and then he drags in a shuddering breath, draws away and his eyes shut and close me out again.
He runs a hand over his face. There’s a rip under the arm of his coat.
“I could sew that,” I say, pointing to it. “It would only take a moment.”
And so, I mend the tear in his clothing, still warm from his body as I hold it on my knees. The moment is gone, and yet it lingers like the warmth in this coat.
16
HALDUR OAKENSEN
Day three without Hessa.
I keep feeling the stitches where my coat is mended. I rub at them like a healing wound and my eyes drift to Iva where she works mending a harness as she rides her horse, or gently teasing Gragor until he can’t help but smile, or stirring a pot beside the fire while Lady Fliad looks on with sharp eyes.
And if I weren’t charged with delivering her to her wedding day, perhaps I could be Haldur again when I am with her. Her smile brings back memories of home. I can still smell her on my coat from where it brushed her long dark hair while she fixed the tear. She mends more than cloth. I see her mending my vassals as we journey.
She could mend me like that. She could stitch my tears back together. They’d still not be the same, but they’d be closer to whole, closer to salvaging.
I can see it all in my mind. Just like I can see what would have happened had I actually kissed her when I came so close to it by that fire. Just the memory makes my pulse pound in my throat and body throb with the memory. Only honor held me back from it.
But in my mind’s eye, I feel her welcoming softness. In my imagination, I feel her gentle arms wrapping around me, drawing me into that warm place where all my tears and wounds are welcomed and I’m safe just to rest – even if it’s only for a moment.
I swallow and wrap that dream up carefully in folds of wistfulness and tuck it down next to my spine where I keep all my burdens.
This burden is one I want to bear.
