When he knew that Aerhril was with child, the first thing he said to her was that they must be married.
“I think wearemarried,” she said, small hand caressing his chest. “I have been calling you ‘husband’ every night, many times a night, for quite some time now, have I not?”
“No, no,” he said. “There will be a ceremony. In the chapel.”
She grimaced. “There?”
“That is where marriages are conducted,” he protested. And then he felt that hot shard of shame burning its way through him. “I am sorry, you know. For what I did to you there.” He was sorry, he truly was.
“You are not sorry,” she said, her lip curling. “You would do it again.”
But these things could coexist. He could be sorry and also know he would do it again. He said, “I would not. If I could change it, I would.”
They lied to each other sometimes.
He thought they both knew the other was lying, but as they had grown together, they no longer forced the other to admit it aloud. Sometimes, the lie was a kindness, a declaration, a sign of their love. So, the other accepted it as the gift it was.
“I want a traditional red wedding dress,” she said. “None of these newfangled blue things they are wearing now in the south.”
He did not say that she had been wearing one of those newfangled blue dresses on the day he had violated her in that chapel. He said, “I would have it no other way.”
And if the clergy who he approached about performing the ceremony initially resisted, Dathor convinced him to doit anyway. Perhaps he used threat. Perhaps he made his voice lethal. Perhaps he rose to his full height and sneered at the man.
It did not matter.
They would be married.
Finally.
And anyway, it would annoy Celedin. That was not the point, of course, but it was gratifying.
39
WHEN AERHRIL ANDDathor got married in the chapel, her belly starting to grow rounded with the babe growing within her, Dathor said that he was the steward and Celedin objected.
When Celedin married Hafindel only two months later, he said he was the steward and Dathor objected.
When Dathor moved them into the steward’s chambers, Celedin said that he didn’t like that room and had never wanted to stay there anyway, and besides, all his clothes were in his old chambers, and that this didnotmake Dathor the steward.
When the baby was born, a little boy with elfin features, a shock of black hair, and smooth skin that was tinted gray-ish green nonetheless, Dathor declared the child the heir to Foxglove Peak.
And Celedin said thathischild would be the heir, just as soon as he got one on Hafindel.
But that never happened. They remained entirely childless, and Aerhril and Dathor had three children, two boys and one girl, and the children played in the fields of wildflowers and learned when the sky was so dark that the bad storms were coming, and they climbed to the tops of the turrets of the Peak and they snuggled warm into their parents arms at night.
Celedin never left the keep, and he claimed to be thesteward until the day he died, and Dathor never agreed he was, and they all lived there together.
It was big enough.
And it was their home.
She did not know if they were happy.
It was an odd thing, she thought, the way happiness was reckoned. It required one to weigh the joyous elements of one’s life as more important than the elements that were pain and agony, she supposed. Perhaps some people had lives in which there were more joyous elements than there were painful ones.
That had never been their lives, not before the revolution, and not after.
There were all manner of hardships.
