33. A Secret Given
N icodemus was no stranger to pain, but being in that bath with Viola was some kind of exquisite torture he knew would come back to haunt him in dreams and nightmares both. When she’d kissed his cheek, he thought he’d kill to have her kiss him again, and then she had. He could still feel the imprint of her touch against his chest, and the ghost of the kiss that brushed his lips before Cordelia interrupted them.
His chest ached with a pain far deeper than any of the wounds she was currently doctoring. His skin was hot. He felt sick again, feverish and bothered, and a part of him wanted to tell her to go.
The other, much stronger part of him wanted to ask her to crawl underneath his covers, to press that body of hers to his, to cage him beneath her, to apply her mouth to every part of him.
Not right, of course. A terrible idea. Perhaps the worst he’d ever had.
But she could be the best of his terrible decisions.
Cordelia appeared briefly with a tray of food for them, surprising him by not staying and instead hurrying off somewhere, leaving Viola to redress his wounds instead. She might have had less skill than Cordelia, but she was certainly more gentle. Or perhaps there was just something else about her touch.
There was something else about her everything.
She’d been quiet since she’d put him back on the bed, her focus pin sharp. It was entirely possible she was just concentrating on the task at hand, but perhaps she was regretting what had passed between them in the tub. He’d almost died. He’d saved someone she cared about. She felt guilty, he was naked, she was confused…
He supposed he ought to be grateful that the sight of his naked body hadn’t had the opposite effect on her. He was probably a lot leaner than her usual lovers. She hadn’t seemed to notice the scarring on his leg, but it wasn’t particularly sightly—none of him was, right now. He was covered in cuts and bruises.
“I should never have asked you to help me,” Viola said eventually, her voice terse.
He glanced at her. Her gaze was still on his wounds, nowhere near his. Anger laced her voice, anger and something else.
“It was reckless and stupid, and I didn’t think—”
“Someone you loved was in danger. Of course you didn’t.”
Viola turned away from him. “I don’t… Freya and I… it’s not like that.”
Nico shrugged, trying to avoid showing how delighted he was that she didn’t love Freya. “You can love someone without being in love with them. You care about her. I imagine you don’t have many people in the world you feel so strongly for.”
“No,” Viola responded, her jaw tight, “I don’t.”
He sensed there was something else she was keeping back. He didn’t want to pry, but at the same time, he was equally sure he wanted to know.
“Is there something else?”
She moved off the bed, the mattress turning icy without her. She stepped over to the window, staring out at the woods, casting the same silhouette she had the first night, when he’d had to stop and draw her.
He didn’t want to draw her, now. He wanted to go to her.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to help me,” she said quietly.
“You already said that.”
“No, I mean… I shouldn’t have asked you. ”
“I’m clearly missing something here. I don’t understand the issue. Of course you asked me. Who else has my kind of power?”
“I shouldn’t have asked you, because you nearly died, and saving Freya at the cost of your life wouldn’t have been worth it because I still would have lost someone who I… who I…” Her lip trembled, and something silvery trickled down her cheek.
The room fell silent. Nico’s shadows crept up from the bed, stretching towards her back, as though they hoped to wrap around her. An ache had settled in his chest. He didn’t like it. He ought to have enjoyed the knowledge that she cared for him. It was what he wanted, after all, but deeper than the desire to be wanted was the desire not to cause another person pain .
It hurt, to care. Hatred was easier. He did not want to be the source of any of her pain.
And he knew he would be.
His shadows slunk away from her.
“You don’t have to hide your tears,” he said.
“I don’t cry.”
“Everyone cries.”
“Not me,” she whispered, her voice like an echo across a frozen lake. “Not anymore.”
“Tell me,” he begged. “If you can. Tell me when you last cried.”
Viola took a deep, staggering breath, like someone about to plunge underwater, unsure when they’d be able to resurface. He half expected her to forego the dive, to run away, to snap him into silence once more.
His shadows had drawn out over his shoulders, like separate hands, all of them reaching for her. He just about managed to hold them back.
Tell me, Viola, he wanted to say. You’ve seen my wounds. Now show me yours.
“I told you that I lost my family,” she began. “But I didn’t tell you anything about them. I don’t tell anyone about them. The whole time Freya and I were together, I never mentioned them. I couldn’t. The only friend I still have who knows about them grew up with me, but we don’t mention them either. I buried far more than their bodies.”
She took another breath, like surfacing for air during a storm.
“I had two loving parents, a doting grandpa, and two siblings—Sebastian and Miranda. Seb was my twin.”
A twin. Nicodemus knew a little of what it was like to be born with someone beside you, his shadows the first playmates he’d had. But they were silent and cold and however much he loved them, they didn’t love him back. He imagined what it would be like to be ripped from his powers, and amplified that by a hundred.
No wonder she never spoke of her brother.
“It was just the two of us for ten years,” Viola went on. “Then Miranda came along, and we loved her from the moment she was born. She was always jealous of us—the fact we had each other. I think we spoiled her rotten trying to make up for that, always including her in things even when she was far too little. I was a terrible influence on her. Seb was the good one.”
Longing laced every syllable. Nicodemus had this terrible, impossible desire to meet this brother she admired so much. For a moment, Viola’s loss felt like his.
Viola’s hand brushed her wrist. “She couldn’t say our names when she was a baby, so we were just ‘Seb’ and ‘Vi’ to her. And she was ‘Ran’. She cried and cried when I said that I was leaving to become a squire. I tattooed our names in Sunscript on my wrist to let her know I was taking her with me. She wanted one of her own, of course.”
She paused in her story, taking another breath, longer than before—as if she thought it might be the final one she ever took.
“While I was away at the House of Wind, the thatched roof of our farmhouse caught aflame from a stray spark from a bonfire set by the farm hands. Lifted up by the wind. I’m told my parents and grandpa died of smoke inhalation. Never woke up, the survivors said. Seb and Miranda weren’t so lucky. My brother died throwing himself from the upstairs window. He’d gone to save our little sister, but there was no way out, so he tucked her into his arms and jumped. The farm hands took her broken body and tried to get her help. I received news a few hours later. The whole way there, I was begging whatever gods might exist to spare her. That I would never complain of anything ever again as long as she was saved. But when I got there, and saw how broken she was…” She swallowed. “I spent the next few hours beside her, half praying she would go quickly, half terrified of when that moment came because then… then I’d be truly alone.”
Tears trembled down her face.
“That was the last time I ever felt afraid.”
Nicodemus was no stranger to sad stories. His own tale was built on bricks of tragedy. For years, he’d believed himself hard done by, had hated the world, had vowed revenge—
And yet here was Viola, who had lost even more than he had, who had no enemy to fight, nothing to do but pick up the sword and carry on living.
He wanted his shadows to crawl into the past and prevent her loss from ever occurring. He wanted to shoulder her grief, to shield her from it.
But he did not have that power.
Viola carried on talking. “How could I think that about my baby sister? How could I have wanted her to die? I would have looked after her. I would have done anything for her, protected her from everyone, shielded her every day for the rest of her life—how could I have abandoned her?”
“You didn’t,” Nico insisted. “You were there for her. And you were scared and worried and thinking all sorts of things in grief and anger that you wouldn’t have thought eventually. You didn’t betray her in any way.”
Viola swallowed, her head bowed, still staring out of the window. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
Nicodemus could understand that. There were plenty of weaknesses he’d kept to himself over the years, and not just for lack of someone to tell them to. “I’m glad you told me.”
Viola continued on. “After she died, I found a spot on her arm and wrote our names there. Then I went to the morgue and did the same for Seb. I didn’t dare look at the bodies of the rest of my family. I was told it was best not to. I stared at the sheets covering them, aware of how shrunken and small they were… barely anything left of them all. Husks. Shells. Charred flesh and bones. Nothing left of my family at all. Five bodies in that room. Almost everyone I loved in the world.”
She paused again in her story.
“After I buried them, I returned to my apprenticeship. I stayed in my room for about a week. I shed my tears until there were none left in me. When I came out, I wasn’t the same. Most of me had crisped away as surely as my home had. I was determined to be the best knight I possibly could be. Training distracted me. Training saved me. But I haven’t shed a tear from that night. Until this one. Until you. ”
Shadows weren’t enough for this. With great difficulty, Nicodemus rose from the bed, his leg radiating pain, and hobbled towards the window. He fastened his arms around her middle like moss clinging to stone.
Viola’s eyes widened in the reflection, her body stiffening underneath him. “You should be resting.”
“I absolutely should be hugging you right now.” A groan escaped him, his knee threatening to give way.
“You’re hurting yourself. Go sit back down.”
“I will, if you come with me.”
Viola turned around to face him, hooking her arm around his waist just in time. She manovered him back to bed and slid in beside him, her arms still around him as if she wasn’t sure whether or not to let go.
He hoped she didn’t. He hoped she never let go.
His fingers played with the drawstrings on her shirt. She’d changed into another one of his after the bath. He loved the look of charcoal grey against her skin.
“You’re wearing one of my shirts again.”
“You keep leaving them in my room.”
“ Your room?”
“ My room,” she told him. “Unless you offer it to others in my absence?”
“No others,” he assured her, his hand sliding to the back of her neck. He gathered her hair in his fingers. For weeks now—maybe months, maybe forever—he’d dreamed of plunging his hands into her curls and crushing his mouth to hers.
In the books he read, people spoke of always. He’d never understood how that could be true until now.
“There are no others but you, Viola.” There will never be others after you.
“My room, then,” she replied, as if she were laying claim to something. “My… ”
Her voice trailed away. One of the hands around his waist moved to his face, her fingers sliding along his cheek, her thumb resting against his chin. Her touch was butterfly soft, silk and velvet and fur and human and Viola. Her. Always her.
Slowly, she bent her head towards his, their mouths meeting in the kind of kiss the poets wrote about. Soft lips pressed together, the kiss hardening, mouths sliding, skin on skin, flesh on flesh. It was drowning in delirium. It was air itself. Nico’s thoughts unravelled, like paper and ink, words dissolving on a pyre. He clung to her, fingers sinking into her clothes, and for the first time in years, the darkness seemed to vanish.