38 #3
There was much in their relationship, he had come to see, that was a burden for her.
He supposed some of that burden was what gave their love its raw power, the fact that taking him on caused her discomfort.
She must bear a sense of humiliation, a sense of owning the fact, publicly, that she had lowered herself.
Sometimes, he hated her for that.
But it wasn’t her he hated, he knew. It was the world itself, the world that had made him into something burdensome.
Perhaps, there was something else in it, too, something deep and savage, right at the core of it. He was huge and she was small. There was an element of his being a burden every time he lay over her, every time he engulfed her delicate form with his burly one.
That ignited him in certain ways. Sometimes it made him feel helpless rage, and he could not say that he always handled that rage well.
Sometimes it spilled out of him and onto her.
He ruminated, sometimes, in the depths of the night or when a fierce storm raged outside the walls of Foxglove Peak, on that time he had become aware of the pleasure he felt seeing women in pain.
It disgusted him.
He wanted to burn it out of himself.
But it would not be seared away entirely. Some of it was written on the walls of his own soul. It wasn’t every woman, really. It was elf women.
There was a kinship there. They had something in common. They were both lesser in the eyes of the elf men. But they both had some element that raised them a bit—they were elves, he was a man—and this was what they both were.
When he watched elf women suffering, he saw himself suffering. When he made an elf woman suffer, he felt like he had risen to the level of an elf man.
The pleasure was shot full of twists of shame, bright red and pulsing, an agony that felt sweet in its own way.
Try as he might, he could not stop it from igniting within him, again and again, though he did what he could, when he noticed, to douse it away. He wanted to be better than that.
Sometimes, he was.
Other times, he succumbed to things that made him ashamed.
When his brother wrote a letter to him, Dathor was not certain he wanted to know the other man.
Dathor had left the boy the heir to the land that their mother’s husband had owned, but Dathor’s brother—his name was Earil—had been a baby then, and the land had passed to someone else to hold until Earil came of age.
One way or the other, Dathor had killed Earil’s father, that was the thing. How could he claim brotherhood with someone when he’d done such a thing?
So, it was weeks before he decided to write back, but he did.
It never came to much more than that, really, letters. Earil wanted to know about their mother. He craved the stories of her that Dathor would write out in his long letters, grateful when he wrote back to know who she had been. The boy wanted to know where he came from, that was all.
You came from violence, Dathor wanted to write, but he didn’t.
Perhaps that was the way of it, in the end.
All of nature, even the pretty parts, had some element of violence to them.
Was his love for Aerhril beautiful precisely because of the way it moved them both, the violence they both felt pulsing beneath their ribs when they saw each other?
Or was it beautiful in spite of that?
Perhaps the distinction really didn’t matter.
It was love.
When he knew that Aerhril was with child, the first thing he said to her was that they must be married.
“I think we are married,” 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 do it 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.