32. 31
It was an alarmingly simple choice. He could pick no other, and I couldn't let him.
Without thinking too hard, I placed my bare hand into his gloved one. My words barely muttering against the thrum of the tittering crowd, I responded, “I will be your maiden.”
I felt his exhale, and there was a second of relief as he squeezed my hand, and then he was back to his role.
He lifted my hand up. “I have selected my maiden!”
There was a loud cheer, and the drums started up again and the crowd parted back to the chariot. Then, we were running. Davian pulled me down the boulevard framed by hundreds of laughing faces, and we dashed down the gauntlet like children.
Hand in hand, it was a blur, and I couldn’t help but smile as people cheered us on like newlyweds. Only seconds later, we were at the chariot. Davian leapt up to the four-foot-high platform, and then reached out, and helped me to clamber up.
Once more, he took my hand and lifted it into the sky as we turned to face the crowd. It was dizzying to see it like this. Thousands of faces staring at us in delight. Thousands waiting on Davian’s next word.
It was heady and stronger than the wine coursing through my blood.
Davian spoke, his voice booming out from my side. “Let each of you have half my luck this evening! And live now, as if the night may never take you! For this night and all the dark nights to come!”
At that, the audience knew this was their cue. They raised whatever drink they had left, and they yelled back: “For all the nights to come!”
I grinned, and Davian touched his hand to my waist as the voice yelled out their chorus.
“Ready?” he murmured.
I looked up at him, then down at his open mouth. I dampened my lower lip, and nodded.
He shook his head. “Say it.”
“I’m ready,” I said, without a moment’s pause.
He smiled, and it was his own and real smile. Then his hand wrapped around the back of my waist and in the waiting pregnant pause after the chorus response, he leaned in and kissed me.
On the mouth. It was just a kiss. But it was so much more; it was a turning moment. His lips pressed to mine, and the crowd exploded with clapping and stomping.
I laughed into Davian’s mouth as he kissed me longer.
I pressed my own mouth back to his, our lips moulding to one another as easily as breathing, as naturally as anything.
It wasn’t a chaste kiss, but it wasn’t hungry either.
This was a kiss for display, for performance.
It couldn’t be anything more, not with Davian’s huge helmet blocking any greater movement.
It lasted no time at all, and when he pulled back, it only left me wanting more.
I stared up at him, and I could tell he felt the same way.
“I’m going to pick you up now,” he said. My eyes widened as he continued. “It is tradition that I ferry my maiden away into the night.”
Then one arm was under my knees, and the other at my back, and he lifted me as if he had the strength of the bull, as well as its face. Davian jumped down from the chariot, nimble and fast. He picked a direction and forged us forward.
I clung to his neck, my fingers netted together.
I didn’t look at where we were going, only at him, the candlelight warming his already dark features.
His mouth crooked in a constant performed smile.
The smile of the Prince of Darkness. I watched his throat bob as he swallowed, I saw the drip of sweat come down the side of his face, and glisten around his lips.
He was the most beautiful man I had ever known.
Either that, or the wine was hitting far more than expected.
The wine, or Davian, or both, drowned out the crowd. My palms tingled and I sighed into him as he held me close.
Then the light fell from his face, and we were in the shadows. He had taken us out of the main square, and down an alleyway. He lowered me onto my feet, and I released my grip, but held onto his arm to steady myself.
Davian stared at the hand on his arm, and then he glanced back around the corner to the square, and cursed under his breath. A handful of the townsfolk had set themselves on following us, it seemed, from the boots approaching and the calls of ‘they went this way’.
We both looked at each other, uncertain, and I then pointed to a side door behind him. “In there?”
Davian checked the door, clearly expecting to find it locked. To both of our surprise and rare fortune, it was unlocked. Forgotten by some careless drunk merchant, perhaps. Davian gave it a quick shove. “That’ll do.”
We bundled in together into the dark and empty room beyond, and Davian closed the door quietly. Then we waited. Boots pounded along the cobbles, some paused, but then they were off again, and the calls faded into the night.
We made eye contact, and let out a relieved sigh.
Davian leant against the door, getting his breath back.
He pulled off the huge helmet, and beneath it he was just him.
No mask. No character. Only the man I had entirely fallen for and hated to admit it, even now.
His hair was stuck to his forehead, curling around his blackened mark as his breath came through his flared nostrils.
He leaned his head back, and it was a struggle to not fixate on the shape of his neck.
Instead, I stared around the room. It looked like a warehouse or store room of some kind.
The back of a merchant’s, with the store front surely facing the square.
I couldn’t make out the stock with only the obfuscated light through the gaps in the curtained windows.
I just sat heavily on top of a crate, and let my mind catch up with me.
Davian had other ideas. He crossed to the other side of the room, and opened one of the doors. This one, he peered into and then closed again. The other, he exclaimed. “Aha!”
I stood and gave him a questioning look.
“There’s a staircase leading up to a landing.”
“And?” I asked.
His eyes flashed in the low light, and he offered me a shy smile. Whatever bravado he’d had out there, we’d lost it for now. Our footing rocked, and the wine was only partially responsible. “Let’s watch the show.”
“There’s more?”
He grinned wider at the wonder I couldn’t suppress. “That was just the preamble.”
I stepped towards him, and he started up the stairs. Then I stopped, and he turned to look at me.
I fiddled, playing with the crease of my dress. “We should talk.”
“After,” he said, and it was spoken with such sincerity that I trusted him. He reached out, offering me his hand for the second time that night. “I can’t let you miss this.”
I took his hand, closed the door behind us, and let him lead us up the stairs.
At the top, there was indeed a large window, facing out into the candlelit crowd below.
From this height, I felt like a king of men, staring out upon my subjects.
But they weren’t staring at us this time.
A wide circle had been cleared in front of the empty chariot.
The chariot that had housed the Prince, and the drummers, now formed a new line twenty paces away from it, and the crowd were behind those.
Two people cloaked in black were setting something up in the back of the empty chariot, alone in front of the trickling fountain, and the drums set a fast pace that quickened by the second.
I was about to speak, about to ask why such a large clearing had been formed, when the two cloaked people lit a small flame at the edge of the chariot, and then darted away to join the crowd.
The drums came to a crescendo as the lick of flame ate up a rope, and I could only stare. A faint hiss. The drums stopped.
And then, a fizzling noise. For a moment, I thought whatever they had planned had failed. And then a faint boom, and a beam of red light shot up into the sky. I gasped as I followed its trail into the stars. My heart was in my mouth as it winked out, and then. Boom. It exploded!
Red sparks filled the night sky, and I could do nothing but watch as another green shoot, like a spark of pure life, darted into the sky, and sprayed out in bright green wonder across the night.
More and more rose and broke upon the darkness, until I could hardly believe people could have concocted such delight. Colours fell out on top of one another, like a painting that unfolded and then disappeared against a dark canvas. There, and then gone, in such delightful bursts I was enraptured.
When it ended, and the night settled into an expectant and beautiful smoky quiet, I hung in that silence with them. And when the crowd erupted into applause, I followed suit, clapping my hands just as loud as the rest of them. I had forgotten all about Davian, silent as the grave behind me.
I whirled around to him, surprised to find I had shed a tear. “That was… I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said, breathily as I wiped it from my cheek. “I’ve never been allowed out on this night before. I thought the noises were just the drums, the light just distant torches or bonfires.”
Davian watched me with an expression I could not name. Then he smiled true. “Sometimes to venerate Death and Pain, is to venerate the absence of it, and the gift that can be.”
I nodded, and felt the need to cry again. “I see that now.”
We stared at each other. The former Ekrissian and the man with two marks.
Both of us needed our devotion to survive.
Now, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to place mine.
Where it should sit, who I should be. This night had shown me how much there was in the world that I didn’t know existed. What else was out there?
The thoughts alone were blasphemous.
Davian reached out, and then pulled his hand back to his side. He frowned. “Annie, I want to apologise.” His hand curled into a fist. “I have been foul to you.”
“You weren’t foul.” I shook my head at him, suddenly exhausted from our games and our fighting. “We were both honest. Too honest, maybe.”
The moonlight caught on Davian’s face as he stared at me.