Chapter 21
XXI.
A sennight later, the smokehouse needed finishing touches before Baró announced its completion.
He had not been passionate about the project, complying because Rivani wished it, but when he needed distraction it became a welcome object of diversion.
The foundation excavation had been tedious, but he took pleasure in fitting the masonry debris together like a fine strategic puzzle, putting his mind to a challenge that consumed him beyond weary survival.
Rivani surrendered her involvement, seeing the unexpected sign of creative genius manifest in his careful construction, engaging his mind in a way she had not witnessed before.
Rivani asked that he not leave for her ovulation and when he made no gesture of readying himself to depart, she privately rejoiced.
The unintended consequences of proximity meant that her own desires could not be hushed.
She enjoyed watching him work, snuggling into her fox fur cloak and pretending that she snuggled Baró instead.
If he were human, Rivani would have not have been alone in reveling in the surface pleasures of watching him — the rippling muscles, the sweat-sheen on his fur even in the midst of the cold, the sheer power of his body.
But he wasn’t human, and for Rivani that added another level of physical intrigue even if no one else would have been open to understanding it.
More than even that, she found beauty in the shape of his mind, evident in his work as he figured out ways, sometimes extraordinarily simple and other times absurdly complex, of maintaining a solid structure for her purposes.
Before he volunteered to build the smokehouse, Rivani anticipated putting together a makeshift clutch of branches with a ring of masonry around it for support and a crawl space.
Now, under his hand, it had become something functional for both of them, not just a construct that might last the season.
The practical manifestation of his cleverness — managing the calculations without the benefit of writing and utilizing the sub-par materials as if they were commissioned from a quarry — spoke of an intelligence that she could have only guessed at.
Save for this project, she might never have known his capacity for brilliance even if his innate ability and speed at acquiring her language hinted at it.
She bit her lip, watching him one morning, his exhalations billowing out in white puffs from his nostrils.
“You’re a younger son,” she announced, trying again to fit the pieces of him together just as he fit the stones of the smokehouse. “Clearly well-educated. You have a logical strategic mind. You have mentioned the military. Were you, perhaps, a military engineer?”
“Indeed, I was.” He halted his efforts to give her his attention, one hand covered in pitch to finish the walls.
“I do not know what the topography of the area around us might look like now, but when I was not bound to the land, the river kept washing out the wood bridge until we built one of stone.”
“The one with the dedication on it to the Great Holy asking that it may stand a hundred years?”
“I built that bridge.” In a rare display of delight and pride, he grinned, all tooth and variegated gum. “Not alone of course, but I designed it and went down with the masons to construct it. It took a year, but I am gratified to know that it still stands.”
“I didn’t think that the de Vaccas approved public works like that. Special dispensation? Or a royal road?”
Baró’s expression shuttered and his voice dropped. “Luca de Vacca stayed here several times.”
“Special dispensation then.” An uncomfortable suspicion germinated in Rivani’s mind, a suspicion no bigger than a grain of sand but one she could not ignore. “Before or after he was king?”
“Before.”
“Did you ever host his brother, Arturo?”
Baró stilled like prey caught in a predator’s gaze. “He was here too.”
“Ah, look at my Baró,” she teased, trying to ease his tension, “hob-nobbing with the royalty.”
“How do you know so much about the de Vaccas?” The amusement he displayed at her pronouncement of hob-nobbing gave way to something more serious despite the light tone. “Are you a secret historian, Rivani?”
“No, Baró. But the Rivani tell stories. And the de Vaccas instigated the Great Persecution even if the sentiment did not arise with them. It would be difficult not to know about them when they played so important and detrimental a role in our history.”
“I am sorry. Of course there are stories.”
“Not all of them are bad,” she said. Unable to leave her suspicion alone, she elaborated.
“There’s one of a de Vacca — Arturo de Vacca,” she baited, “who we call The Rivan Prince. Though obliged to placate his family, he helped shelter and safeguard the Rivani, fund their escapes, and set up new lives elsewhere.”
Baró shrugged and redirected his attention back to the smokehouse.
He resumed pitching the sides. “The Rivani give praise to one who did too little.” Bitterness laced his words.
“I understand working within the confines of an existing structure to change it, but not using his position to better the lives of the Rivani constituted a moral failure. I was such a one and I condemn myself for my weakness and cowardice daily. The Rivani should do the same.”
“I’m not saying that there should be praise heaped upon him for doing a fraction of good in the face of overwhelming harm. But the stories do not just recount misery. There’s hope too. The Rivan Prince features often in our stories.”
Baró bristled and shivered.
“Though a claimed son of the king,” she continued, “Rivan sorceresses could see the magic of his true father’s Rivan bloodline.”
“I heard the rumors about the prince at the time too.” He wiped his hand on the straw pile nearby and took long hurried strides back toward the keep. “I’m cold and going in.”
Rivani flinched. Something struck a nerve.
Baró had never been curt with her before unless he was experiencing the Magic, but that came with a different set of behaviors, other types of redirection, and that ceased when they abandoned the active use of magic.
She gave him a respectable head start before she followed, lest he feel pursued.
She found him in the solar that they now used for joint comfort when they did not feel like using the kitchens.
“May I share the fire or do you need space?” She waited in the doorway.
He sat on the floor, his back to her, tail curled around his bottom, legs crossed in front of him. His back tensed when she spoke. He turned his face in profile to answer and hesitated, not seeming to know what he would prefer. At last, he sighed and turned his face away.
“I would rather your company.”
She removed the cloak and folded it over the chaise between them before she circled the piece of furniture so that he sat between her and the hearth. She let the silence continue for some time.
“What happened?” She asked when his shoulders finally eased.
“I feel so disconnected from that time, that life,” he confessed to her, or rather confessed to the fire. “Being reminded of — of people I knew and other mundane failings of mine that aren’t soul-staining crimes.” He shrugged. “Old wounds reopened.”
She gazed at his back. The small pebble of far-fetched suspicion that Baró could have been the Rivan Prince of the campfire stories and songs grew to boulder size with every new piece of his puzzle. And if somehow, that figure had also become the Fir’Darl...
“May I touch you?”
He nodded and she moved to the edge of the chaise, reaching out to rub his shoulder.
“I did not mean to revive old, useless hurts.”
“I know.” He reached up with the opposite hand to put it over hers. “You have a wounded, broken creature for a companion.”
“Wounded, perhaps. Not broken. Remade.” She squeezed his shoulder.
He took a deep, ragged breath, emotion evident but not visible, demonstrated only in the way the air passed through his mouth and nostrils, catching somewhere in his throat. “Would you tell me about the Rivan Prince?”
“I can try.” She spent a moment attempting to recall the facts of the stories.
“King Hemnesio always despised the Rivan people but began the systematic persecution of us after the birth of his younger son, Arturo. The queen had not been faithful after the firstborn, taking to her bed a beautiful Rivan man. Though the infidelity could not be proven, the young prince possessed the same black curling hair and bronzed skin of his natural father and grew tall and beardless like those of his race. The Rivani could see the magic of the Rivan blood that the prince carried in his veins and the Rivani paid tribute to the younger prince, making the prince dangerous to his family and his government. His family instilled hate of the Rivani in him, recognizing that, if he sympathized with his own blood kin and gained the support of the Rivan sorceresses, he would be positioned to take the throne for himself. The prince tried to do his family’s bidding but found alternate ways to keep the Rivani from falling into harm.
The king and the crown prince, Luca, could not tolerate the leniency or perceived undermining of the throne and conspired to be rid of the young prince forever.
An atrocity was staged, the young prince blamed, and the Rivani incensed into killing him so that Hemnesio and Luca would have justification to continue their genocide.
The Rivan seers said that the Rivan Prince would have become one of the Rivani, not just in blood but in culture and practice, embracing his father’s heritage over that of his mother’s — had he lived. ”
“Had he lived,” Baró repeated, his voice a whisper.
A long silence stretched between them.
“Were you a friend of his?” Rivani asked.
“I knew him,” Baró said. “I heard the rumors of his parentage many times, weaponized against him, until he learned to hate himself and the Rivani equally for it.” He paused for another long moment. “What was the staged atrocity?”
“Not tonight, Baró,” she whispered and kissed the backside of his ear before she stood and left for bed. She would be tempted to do more if she stayed.