Chapter XXXV
XXXV.
Someone moaned.
All was darkness. Had someone put a hood back on me? If they bound my hands behind my back again, that would explain why my back and shoulders ached so much.
But hadn’t I died? Out in the snow, saving Alaina. I had frozen to death. But surely, death should be less painful.
I hoped Alaina was safe.
Someone moaned again.
“Great Holy,” came a breathless whisper. “You’re awake.”
Clearly, they meant someone other than me because I was dead. And I couldn’t be awake when I was dead, could I?
I managed to say, although it came out raspy and hesitant, “Someone is in pain.”
“Yes,” said my unseen companion, her voice stronger now. “That someone is you.”
“I’m dead,” I told her, still half-certain that I was.
“No, but you gave it a good effort.” Fingertips, warm and gentle, touched a place on my collarbone. “I thought I lost you several times.”
“I’ll try harder next time then.”
“There better never be a next time,” she scolded me in that commanding tone. “I’ve barely slept for worry.”
“I told you to leave me, princess.”
“And I told you that I wouldn’t. Are you thirsty?”
I nodded. Or I thought I nodded. I couldn’t tell with my head throbbing.
Something hard and cold met my bottom lip. Then it tilted upward. Water flowed slowly and in spurts as the rim seesawed. I licked my lower lip when the cup withdrew. I couldn’t remember the last time I had drunk from a cup.
“Are we safe?” I asked. “Are you well?”
“We are safe and I am well, all because of you.”
“Have I been rendered blind by the cold?” My question came out more bravely than I thought it would.
Although I had become accustomed to the hood and the sightlessness it inflicted, light still peeked around the fastenings.
And yet, now, no light had greeted me. If that had been the price I had to pay, although a hefty one, then so be it.
She did not respond. I registered her intense stillness more than anything else.
“I befriended you sight unseen,” I reminded her. “I can live with that if you promise still to talk to me occasionally.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so anyway. You’ve been in and out of fever for so long that you’ll have to tell me if anything else is amiss. I have few candles lit and you’re bandaged, which is likely why all is darkness to you.”
Bandages implied injury, but I could live with injury.
“I had to shave your face for the physician. I didn’t do a very good job.” Her fingers stroked my right cheek. “You have dreadfully uneven stubble now.”
I asked without time to think better of it, “Would you prefer feathers?”
She pulled her hand away.
“I wanted to tell you,” I confessed. “So many times I went to and then thought, why burden you with it?”
“No, of course,” she said. “Why would I have expected you to tell me the truth?”
“I did not foresee any reversal of my fate.”
In our first days, I waited on her in silence and in the dark. Her words were balms, her presence a comfort. But for her, she had been with her bird friend, and I was now but a stranger. Her silence suffocated me.
“You should have just let me die,” I told her more bitterly than I intended.
She put her hand on my shoulder, and I pulled away from her grasp.
I could not bear her touch even though I craved it.
She didn’t want me, not like this, not anymore.
And maybe she never truly had. Our coupling had been her defiance, her demonstration of autonomy in the face of one who would have seen her spirit broken, not a statement of true desire.
But for me....
If the last year of my life had not numbed me to grief and heartache, I might have given in to the infantile urge to weep.
Alaina might have told me that she loved me, but I was still someone else to her then, and we were facing death. I couldn’t believe it now.
She tried to touch me again. “I know you’re upset—”
“Damn right, I’m upset!” Anger served me better than tears. “That was supposed to be the end. I was supposed to die. And then I would never again have to worry about disappointing anyone. But I’m alive. And I am still found wanting by the only person I give a shit about.”
“That’s not true, Kaylay.”
“I’m not your Kaylay!” Didn’t she see that was the point? “I’m a complete stranger to you.”
“You’re not a stranger.”
“You screamed when you saw me.”
“I was being held by a magnificent bird one moment, and in the next, I’m being held by a man. Screaming was a perfectly reasonable reaction!”
She wasn’t wrong.
“You’re not a stranger,” she repeated. “When I got to Ilyichia, everyone spoke of the tsarina’s favorite lover.”
Blyat.
The chill of her knowledge combatted the heat of my shame. A fallen prince reduced to servitude and subjugation owned more humiliation than some pretty, anonymous servant the tsarina plucked off the street and made her slave.
“You know who I am.”
“I know you were a respected soldier. I know you worked tirelessly to earn back the honor of a powerful and influential family that your forefathers jeopardized. I know you were considered one of the most eligible bachelors in the royal households of the continent.”
I could not dispute any of it.
“You were also said to be the most handsome man in Ilyichia,” she added.
“Maybe fifteen years ago.”
“I saw you the other day,” she asserted, “and there was no lie.”
“You know too then that I am disgraced,” I reminded her lest she get caught up in her own fanciful and romanticized idea of me.
“No one could miss what she did to you.”
No indeed. How could anyone miss that? Not Alaina, who had been both kind and painfully honest through my initial ordeal.
“I believed her when she told everyone that she had you put to death,” Alaina added. “It seemed highly plausible that she had had her fun and then tired of you. I didn’t put it together that you were him until just a few days ago.”
“But you’ve seen me before—”
“I’ve never seen you without a beak!”
We both fell into silence with the strangeness of that observation.
“I can see why she was so taken with you.” She put her hand on my shoulder again, and I didn’t pull away. “Even as a bird.”
“And what about you? Would you still prefer me with feathers and wings?”
“Kaylay.”
“That means yes.” It hurt more than I expected, even though I anticipated no other answer.
“I have spent my life trying to do the right thing, the honorable thing, and she still took everything from me. Everything. And the only thing I had any personal ability to regain was my humanity. And even then—”
I broke off, unable to complete my thought. My voice already cracked on the words. I wasn’t enough. And I would never be enough.
“You don’t understand,” she insisted. “I didn’t love the beautiful man in the bird costume.
I didn’t know him. But the bird in her menagerie was safe and kind even when I was a horrid little brat.
And I did know him. And I did care about him.
And it turns out that my friend, my love, really was just a beautiful man in a bird costume after all. ”
“Your love,” I repeated, testing its veracity.
“My love,” she assured me.
My right hand fumbled with the blanket as it sought her out.
I wanted her hand. I wanted her to touch me and ground me and remind me what I had tried to die for.
But I could not find her, and I gave up when she did not breach the distance.
Instead, I reached up and touched the linen shirt and then the featherless skin beneath it.
I expanded my explorations to my neck and found it bare.
“I thought I was going to lose you,” she said when she noticed my discovery. “How dare you have the audacity to try and die on me after everything we’ve been through!”
“Alaina, be honest,” I pleaded. “Something is terribly wrong, and you are keeping it from me.”
“You had severe frostbite.” She found my hand and held it between both of hers. “The ship surgeon saved as much as he could.”
“Do I still have...?” I didn’t know how to describe my initial concern delicately. “Am I intact?”
“How like a man!” She choke-laughed, betraying the possibility that she had been crying. “Yes, you’re intact.”
That was a relief. But then other concerns followed.
My left hand had been unresponsive in the cold, and I had not tested it since wakefulness.
I freed my hand from her grasp and threw the blanket off me, hunting for my left arm.
I found my elbow and traveled down the rest of my forearm.
I met bandages at my wrist. I still had a wrist, and I could feel the base of my palm below that, no stump indicating a complete amputation.
“The surgeon took most of three fingers and the tip of a fourth.”
I took a deep breath. It could have been worse.
“Anything else?” I didn’t want to know the answer, but I had to know.
“Four toes on your left foot and the smallest two on your right.”
I could live without toes, even without fingers. But I also had bandages on my face.
“Alaina,” I marveled at my calm, “what do I look like?”
She didn’t answer.
Alaina loved me as a bird, and now she would have preferred me that way. I had to be ugly. A different kind of ugly.
“Please tell me?”
“Kaylay—”
I lost all pretense of patience. I struggled to find my way out of the sick bed on the opposite side of where Alaina sat by me.
I stumbled when I rose, my left leg stiff and subject to stabbing pains that radiated through my foot.
I tore at the bandages that covered my face and freed myself from them.
As Alaina had told me, the few candles still lit around the room offered little light.
It was a sumptuous room, decorated and outfitted like any well-appointed bedroom at court.
I wanted to see if perhaps she had given me her room while I convalesced, but I refused to turn around, certain now that my face was unbandaged, I would offer her nothing but a hideous disfigurement that was all too humanly repulsive.
“You’re still unwell,” she scolded.