Chapter 23
XXIII.
“Do you know what day it is, Baró?” She inquired, bright and eager for the day although the sky boded ill.
Rivani could only see his back and though she had no way of knowing yet, he appeared tense.
Maybe the muscles in his back or the way his head hung gave him away.
It was often more difficult to tell on him than a man due to the spinal lump at the joining of his neck and back.
The spinal formation altered his sleeping position and he held his head and shoulders differently because of it. Maybe he just ached.
“No. What day is it?” Baró did not turn around to look at her but shrugged a shoulder.
Rivani crossed the distance between them and began rubbing his shoulders. Under her touch, she was more convinced that they could use a good pounding and was half-inclined to tell him to lay down while she walked on his shoulders. Did they have a rolling pin? Even then, it might break.
He eased into her touch.
“I referred to my cycle.” She rubbed the back of his neck and kissed it amid her ministrations. “You have been with me through two ovulations and two subsequent blood times now. I have no fear that you will lose yourself in hormones.”
“But I have been lost in hormones. You have just been amenable to intimacy and have consented to let me hold you while we sleep. Indeed, the hormones have addled my mind.”
The forced humor in his voice made her skin prickle. He could pretend, and maybe if she were not so well attuned to him, she would believe his performance, but between the way his muscles twitched and the slight tell of his words, she did not believe in his light air.
“I brought some of my linens for you. I know you enjoy them.”
“Thank you. If you want to leave them...”
Leave them? Baró had not yet turned around to greet her or kiss her or anything. She panicked. “Baró, what’s wrong — were you visited again?”
The long silence, either to form words or to debate telling her at all, made her worry all the more. She wanted to go around him and look at him and make him look at her and tell her, but she just managed to keep it together to let him have the space and time to speak.
“More gifts, Rivani. I am changing again.” His head bent lower and he rubbed at his temple.
She sank onto the bench behind him, pressing her cheek against his back, at once relieved that it was nothing more serious and yet still concerned about the effects these changes had on him.
She did not find them repellent, but she had, as a mental exercise before sleep, tried to envision Baró with every kind of physical alteration she could imagine — spines from his back, slitted eyes, drooping ears, tusks, scales instead of fur, tympanum like frogs, no snout or nose at all, bald from horn to hoof, wings instead of arms, anything more hindering or unsightly than his current form.
And through this whole mental exercise, she had never once thought that any new feature he might bear would affect her feelings for him.
Granted, she had not been tried, and she admitted that to herself, but even if she hesitated or doubted, he would have to become someone different for her to withdraw her affection.
“I’m sorry, Baró. I know it seems terrible to you, but I only care about how it affects you.”
“They come too quickly now,” he told her, a hint of well-controlled apprehension in his voice.
“We have not used the Magic.”
“The visitations abated but not the gifts.”
“What’s changed — your face?” Rivani stroked his back.
“Yes.” He growled. “I am being foolish. You have never shown me the slightest rejection.”
“Apart from vomiting in your courtyard, you mean,” she volunteered with a little regret and a great deal of mischief. When he laughed as she had hoped to make him even if it came at her expense, she kissed his shoulder.
“Apart from that, yes,” he agreed. “I attributed that more to your terror and less to your thought ‘this monster is so ugly, I must vomit on him.’”
“Then show me, Baró.” She tugged on the tufted fur that ran down his spine.
He turned on the bench, head upright again, his gaze fixed elsewhere.
Baró excelled at looking aloof and unaffected, but his shoulders and his arms were rock, his breathing irregular and shallow.
She rose from the bench and stood in front of him, making a show of her inspection.
The snout had expanded and elongated along with his jaw.
The new configuration did not affect his voice, but then Baró produced sounds that seemed like speech, not speech itself.
A bud of a horn protruded from the top of his snout, giving justification for its expansion.
“It’s not bad,” she told him as she had told him about his tongue that first time. And like that first time, it was not good either. She kissed the new horn tip on his snout and then set her brows in challenge. “See?”
“I never feared your reaction,” he confided. His brows furrowed as he met her gaze. “My own shame, not you, deludes me into thinking that you will turn from me one day.”
Rivani stroked his face, trying to be reassuring.
The direction of his gifts and increase in development terrified her even if she had already imagined him with a hundred other changes.
She did not understand the mechanics that made this happen and she did not pretend to understand the Magic and his relationship to It other than to know that It did him little good.
“What will make this stop? Can I offer anything? Would the Magic accept more time from me or could I do something more significant around the keep to spare you?”
“Oh no,” he breathed in horror, raising his hand towards her mouth, as if to silence her, but never touching her.
“I fear that if you offer, She may accept to use it somehow against us. I thank you for your willingness, but I would bear this a hundred times over to keep you safe. Please, do nothing.”
Rivani left his side to find food for them, extracting jars and pumping water for the kettle, while she considered the situation.
“When you communicate with the Magic, does It always tell you the truth?” She asked.
“I have little way of knowing, but I suspect She lies.”
“And the Magic is female? You always refer to It as She.”
“When the Magic visits,” Baró explained as he took the kettle from Rivani and set it up in the hearth, “It presents, in sound and appearance, as a Woman although I think that is for my perceptions alone.”
“Do you think that the Magic would listen to me?”
“Rivani,” he worried she would do something rash, “the Magic already listens to you. I have asked that you bring me your requests so that I may phrase them. The Magic is volatile and hostile. If I ask, then I alone will suffer for it should it come out different than expected.”
“But the power you have here—”
“I have no power, Rivani. I can serve you and I have a line of communication that has consequences.” He spread his hands out, palms up. “I am a forest king with a domain I cannot leave, creatures I can intimidate but not command, and an existence I would end if I could.”
Rivani’s throat tightened. He had once told her that his existence was not so easily escaped.
Like testing the boundaries of his prison, he had likely made attempts on his own life, much as he had confessed to contemplating when a man.
If she found herself in his place, would she not despair after so long alone?
Would she not curse a body that found new ways to hamper and shame her?
Would she not be tempted to discard an immortal life of disappointment, pain, and abuse?
Something needed to be done and he could give her no hint. Maybe the Magic would tell her.
When the water in the kettle started bubbling, she retrieved their drinking vessels and the dried mix of flowers and herbs she kept for tea.
“It’s Rivan Magic,” she observed a few minutes later, her mind still working over the problem.
“Sometimes gender is a strange thing with Rivan Magic. A caster or a supplicant might get a different outcome to a work depending on how they present. Unlike the followers of the Great Holy who categorize everyone as either male and female regardless of spirit or physical ambiguity, the Rivani acknowledge a wide array of sexes and genders. Do you think someone who is a different sex or gender might have a better accord with the Magic since It is likely neither male nor female?”
“I do not know,” he admitted. “My inclination is to say that the Magic is not disposed to bargain kindly with anyone. But where would you even find such a one?”
“Here,” she said. She met his gaze, trying his game of looking unaffected. “I am such a one.”
“You are neither male nor female?”
“When I was born, my sex was indeterminate, leaning to what you might perceive as masculine attributes — so I have always been....” She bit her lip, uncertain how to teach this particular lesson.
“One of the sexes is called nezhiyat. At my coming of age though, I started bleeding. That’s called neavhiyat.
We call my specific gender nahyide. For people who do not acknowledge the wide array of biological or spiritual variances, it’s easier and safer to say I am a woman most of the time, although it’s not the full truth.
I have my days where I feel and present differently.
And among the Rivani, not even all Mothers are women. ”
She did not know how to explain it to a non-Rivani who had set ideas on sex and gender.
“Is that,” Baró hesitated, “why you would be an outcast among your own people?”