“So you’re going to stay here,” she said.
“Well, not forever, I suppose, but just until I can find a way to get free. Perhaps I’ll go to the seas and make my fortune as a pirate. Perhaps I’ll go across the channel to the unclaimed lands and find gold and jewels. Who knows. I’ll come back, and I’ll be rich and I’ll have everything, and you’ll be heavy with his child and so disappointed that you didn’t wait for me and—”
“If you were capable of this,” she said. “The time to have done it was months ago, you fool. You have these fantasies, but you just stay here, content to have me suckle you, to spill your seed down my throat and never change anything—”
“You are betraying me.”
“I am doing this for both of us,” she said. “Yes, it requires some sacrifices—”
“No sacrifices on your part,” he said. “You get to be his wife. You get to have us both.”
She glared at him. “You’ll change your mind. You’reangry, of course you are, but you’ll think it through and you’ll come along and we’ll make the best of it somehow.”
“If I asked you to choose me, you would not,” he said.
“Choose what?” she said. “Choose nowhere to live, no money at all, everyone despising us, no children of our own, living in hiding? There’s nothing about us together we can choose, Dathor. You know it. I know it. This is impossible with us.”
He sucked in a noisy breath through his nose and clenched and opened his fists. He did not disagree with her.
DATHOR WATCHED ELRIONgo in to speak to Celedin and he watched him come back out, red faced, frustrated, walking very quickly.
The offer for Aerhril had been refused, it seemed.
This pleased him. He went about his chores with a skip in his step, though he wondered why, because it was only prolonging the inevitable. She was going to marry some elf, and if it wasn’t Elrion, it was going to be Celedin.
He thought about Celedin, his childhood tormentor, the man who sometimes threw himself at him in a rage and slashed him to bits with knives, the man who paid others to hold Dathor down while he pummeled him.
That man sticking his prick into his Aerhril.
She was correct. He was cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Elrion was obviously the better choice of two evils. But admitting it, it was like admitting defeat. He realized, of course, he was living in some fantasy world, some pretend place where he got to have things that he was never going to get to have.
You do not get an elf wife. You do not get to be with her in front of others. She will never claim you. You will always be her filthy, shameful secret.
Elrion was back the next day. He summoned Aerhril tothe sitting room and kissed her in front of Celedin, that was what Dathor heard. He didn’t see it. Celedin was angry, but Elrion said that she was already marked as his now, tainted by his claim, and that Celedin should simply take the money and go along with it.
Celedin raged and the steward insisted on driving the bride price up to something astronomical, especially when he found out that Elrion wanted Dathor, too, and Dathor owed him money for when he had kept him as a child.
But Elrion agreed to all of it.
And that night, Dathor slumped in the corner of the stables in the darkness and sobbed.
After he was able to stop crying, he crept into her room and awakened her in her bed.
She reached for him, but he didn’t touch her.
“I will come along,” he said. “I would be a fool else.”
She sat up. “Good. I knew you would—”
“But we must…” He touched her hair, fingering a lock of her golden tresses. “We must be realistic about this, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
He let her hair trail through his fingers until he was no longer touching it, no longer touching her. “I relinquish whatever claim I thought I had on you.”
She only blinked at him.
