“They were given to me by a woman in a deep hooded cloak,” Lady Fliad finally admits when I press her in our shared tent.
She’s been crying. She can’t stop shaking and I don’t know if it’s from the horror of what she almost did or the disappointment that she didn’t succeed. I should put an arm around her. I should tell her everything will be well. I can’t summon the words. I can’t cross the tent to her side. I stand, instead, as far from her as I can, my arms crossed over my chest. Around us the canvas flaps and stretches against the bracing and ties, trying to yank itself free. But none of us can be free.
“It was the night before Sir Oakensen arrived,” Fliad says, dully. “I scoffed when she told me I could exchange bodies with someone else. That all I had to do was hold the amulet tight and put my intentions into it for three full days and two full nights straight, and then put one medallion over my neck, and one over the neck of she with whom I wanted to exchange. I asked her why I would want that, and she brought down her hood just long enough for me to see her pointed ear, and then she told me, ‘You’d make a lovely queen,’ and she left.”
I watch her in silence for a long time.
“Was it really so wrong?” she asks in a small voice. “It would have given all of us what we wanted. How could that be wrong? I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t agree.”
I look toward the tent flap.
“Not all of us,” I say, my chest constricting.
It’s three days later that I slip from camp on my own, following my instincts down a small game trail. I can’t admit what I’m doing, so I don’t try. I let my thoughts freewheel instead.
I don’t know what to make of Sir Haldur Oakensen. That he is a man of honor and duty, there is no question. That he would give my future for the peace of his people – again, no question.
But the searing looks he gives me whenever his eyes light on me, gut me. It’s as if he opens a window to me that looks right into his soul, and it goes down, down, down into black nothingness – an endless pit of sorrow that cannot be stoppered.
Still, he looks for me whenever he goes and whenever he returns, only to offer up this aching present – a gift woven of pain and dashed desires. And I know he wishes it could be otherwise and the wishing is eating him alive.
I know, because I wish it, too. And I look for his glances. I meet his eyes on purpose, even knowing what will be in them. I want what I cannot have, and it is rot to my bones and pain through all my sinews.
“Two days’ ride to the front,” he says when I catch him alone, just as I knew I would. Just as I know I should not.
He stands in a patch of dry ground under a pine tree. The hot sun of spring has melted the snow around the tree and dried the fallen needles. I can smell them, dead though they are. They linger in the air, their scent an endless reminder of what is lost.
I move to stand beside him, kicking up more of the funereal scent.
Together, we look over the valley below. Far in the distance, I see a dark mass. The armies, I think. Watching them shakes something loose inside and I clamp my lips tightly together so its whimper will not escape.
He glances at me wildly, as if he can feel it, too. As if he is barely holding it back, too.
His lips part, and as we look into each other’s eyes we share this helpless feeling together, this sad longing for what cannot be – for what neither of us thought was even possible before. Is it worse to know it could have been but is not, or would it have been worse never to know at all? I think I’d rather bear the wound of it forever than unbroken skin that knew not the knife.
He’s shaking all over, and then to my utter surprise he bends slowly – oh so slowly, giving me all the time in the world to walk away – and he doesn’t sweep me up in his arms. He doesn’t press me so that our beating hearts are only separated by fabric and skin. He keeps his hands tight on the hilt of his sword as if it can defend him from this even as he succumbs. He stoops just enough to breathe my air and to softly – soft as a memory that flutters behind thought – press his lips to mine in a chaste kiss.
I think I weep at the touch.
My first kiss.
And likely the last touch by a mortal man. The last touch of skin from anyone who loves me, now that my dogs are far away, the matron of the house far away, my friends and fellow vassals behind me forever.
It is precious if only for its brevity, for the feeling of something stolen and given to me, something bought with a price too steep to pay.
And then he curses in a whisper, choking on the word so that it contorts on his lips, and he’s gone, crunching through the last of the snow, leaving me there to breathe the scent of dead pine and look at my looming future.
20
HALDUR OAKENSEN
Iam twice a fool. A fool to have given the last piece of myself away when I know I can never get it back. A fool to have acted on it for even a breath.
And I don’t even care. I will give my vassals peace. And then I will ride away from here, as far as I can go, until no one knows my name or my sins. I clench my hands on my hilt and I try not to think about Hessa, and I try not to think about Iva being married to that golden demon, and I try hardest of all not to think of how I could have made different choices and kept them both if I’d just held my honor and the lives of other men more lightly.
We ride mostly in silence now, as we enter the valley. The joy of hot food and bathing in rivers has passed. There will be no more warm stables or guest rooms. There will be no more fresh food bought in villages. We are returning to the front, and even though we know that if things go well, it might mean we can return home in mere months, none of us can truly believe it.
The light in Rangen’s eye has been dim since the incident at the river. He twitches whenever he catches sight of one of the women and his hacking cough keeps him hunched over his horse most of the time. If there was another village in which to stop, I would leave him there.
