Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
The eclipse revealed things to me I needed to bury.
I wanted to stay, but I mustn’t. I wanted Fell’s eyes to linger on me, but they didn’t always. He had Inga, and I had Loric and a whole slew of other responsibilities.
I was prepared to never speak on the subject again.
Dania, however, was a treacherous creature who took the greatest pleasure in taunting me.
“How is Fell faring?”
“Tell me about Fell. When did you last see him?”
“Fell is looking lovely today, now isn’t he?”
The more I glared at her, the more she seemed to enjoy herself.
“Do not be cross with me, Gentlewoman, I am not the one who has noticed a man outside of my betrothal arrangement.”
I was beginning to understand the Norsern insistence that hitting people was a reasonable solution to annoyance.
I remained firm, rigid, and owl-faced, until one evening when I was sitting in a chair I’d pulled over to the brazier. My lyre was in my hands, refusing to be played because I was too miserable to make decent music.
“I’m going to kick Fell for how stupid you’re being,” Dania said.
“I don’t care.” My eyes were on the flame flickering in the brazier. I’d been worn hard by her endless teasing.
“Truly, Mira. You deserve your misery. You bathe in it by your own choosing. You revel in it. I cannot have sympathy for you.”
“I’m not asking you to have sympathy—”
“Oh, but you are! You are the whiniest, high-horsiest, most boring—”
I turned my head to look at her, my gaze as cold as the sea in the depths of winter. “Dania, I have not once asked for your thoughts on the matter, have I?”
She smirked, I think because it was the most aggressive I’d been in her presence.
I couldn’t look more owl-faced. I was at maximum owl-face. “Why are you smiling? We are disagreeing.”
She sighed. “Mira, I’m smiling because I know something you don’t know.” She sat there, looking at me, smug and beautiful and all the more annoying for it.
Curiosity got the better of me. I held against it for several beats of my heart, staring at her. “Well? What is it you know?”
She looked pure evil as her smile widened. “Fell likes you, too.”
I didn’t breathe for a moment. I had already thought over the possibility many times since the eclipse, but I’d convinced myself I’d misunderstood him. My eyes fluttered, and I swallowed the threat of tears. “Dania, it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
Another brief staring contest.
“Mira—”
“No, Dania, you’re being cruel. Let it die.”
“Why?”
“Because there is nothing to be gained from it, whether he likes me or not. I have Loric waiting for me, and Fell has Inga—”
She laughed. “Mira, they are only friends—”
“They are not, and you know it.”
“Mira, you don’t know what you’re speaking of. Inga’s lover died in a storm at sea. She and Fell keep each other company in their loneliness, but she is not interested in anything formal between them.”
“How could you know what she’s—”
“Because I asked her, Mira. Because you are my friend, and I can see how much it would mean to you if Fell were taken. I told myself, if they were in love, I wouldn’t bring him up to you, but since they are not—”
“They spend their evenings together—”
“Yes, Mira, they are bed friends. When I asked her how she felt about him, she rolled her eyes and called him a black grouse. In Norsern, that means a pretty fool. It means good for a night, but not good for a lifetime. She wasn’t lying.”
I blinked, hating Inga briefly because who would say such a terrible thing about Fell? “They are not committed to one another?”
“No.”
Something collapsed in my mind.
Dania set her hands on her legs and looked at me with the utmost seriousness.
“Mira, listen to me. Against my better judgement, I have come to like you. If you want to go home and be quiet and guard gold and have boring sex according to prescription and starve yourself on holy days, you are allowed to do that. But, please, for the sake of giving yourself a single happy memory to revisit on cold nights, for the sake of giving me a single evening without your constant scowl, go and have fun with Fell. You can thank me later.”
“If you liked me even the smallest amount, you wouldn’t say such things to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. No one back home could ever find out. But fine. Be cold and dead like a void.”
She left me near the brazier, clutching my lyre, trying to keep my mind empty.
The word void settled in my chest, stinging for several moments straight.
But then, there was a small, pleasant warmth. Inga and Fell are not committed to one another.
I took a drink, and I took it quickly. I was entirely sober, and I didn’t want to be drunk, but I needed to know there would be some softening of my feeling later, depending on how things went.
I had decided on a course of action, but I’d decided it in a tricky manner, without actually thinking through any of it in the front of my mind.
There were too many things that could go wrong for me to think about it too carefully.
All the same, my heart felt skinned raw.
Not acting was its own misery. It had been nine days since the eclipse, and I’d been lost in rumination the entire time.
Arguing with myself. Unable to ignore what I’d become aware of.
I walked with haste through the palace, passing windows open to the sea, the last hint of the setting sun still reflecting on the water.
I knew where I was going. Not because someone had shown me this particular chamber, but because I had paid attention.
Because my mind needed to know everything about him that I could.
The door was open, and I poked my head inside.
Fell sat at a small table, sharpening one of the daggers he kept on his person.
His endless blue eyes settled on my face as his brows rose a little. “You need something?”
I hesitated before stepping into his room, a place I had never been.
Everything was brown or beige in the dim glow of the setting sun and the single brazier.
His blankets looked soft but simple. I am looking at his bed.
I forced my eyes back to Fell. I’d pictured him standing when I’d made my decision.
I’d also pictured the door closed already.
I hesitated again. Already nothing was according to my plan.
I swallowed and straightened my neck.
“You could name me Norsen now,” I said.
He looked at me for three beats of my heart.
“It is done,” he said.
I remained poised and rigid, expecting something else to follow what he’d said, but he stayed quiet.
“That is it?”
He nodded, the corners of his lips lifting.
“There is no ceremony or special words or…”
“No, though some get a tattoo to mark the transition. Sotern are not allowed tattoos anywhere but on the hands and face. Sometimes people throw parties…”
“So, I am simply Norsen now?”
He nodded.
And then neither of us moved.
I looked at him, and he looked at me and I realized what a terrible predicament I was in.
It had taken all of my strength to come to him like this.
My whole life—I hadn’t known it, but my whole life, I’d been saving up droplets of strength, resistance, desire.
I’d saved them for years, hidden them deep within myself, and here I was, spending every last drop at once.
If he refused me or laughed at me or did anything other than welcome me, I would never be able to muster so much courage again. It was my life’s savings.
The corners of his lips twitched again and his brows raised the smallest bit. What are you still doing here? his expression seemed to be saying.
I glared at him, terrified. You know very well what I’m doing here.
He stood slowly—brutally slow. And as he walked toward me, his feet dragged a little.
Not in a way that made me think he didn’t want to come nearer, but in a way that meant he knew coming near would be, as the Norsern call it, a twist of skael.
My heart hammered as he got closer and closer, his eyes so blue they didn’t look real.
As the distance between us disappeared, I knew I’d been called to this man’s side.
He’d been called to mine. The rest of the world could be burning, and we would end up just as we were then.
I tilted my face up to keep looking at him as he stopped shy of our chests touching.
And then, quite inexplicably, but also not at all surprising, we were kissing.
Heat.
Rush.
Aliveness in the way a child who has just been born is alive—each breath burning, each heartbeat aching. Each part of my body not being held felt as cold as the deepest sea. A storm of bravery and fear stirred beneath my ribs. We were cursed and blessed.
But you mustn’t blame us. When a god decides you’ll fall in love, it cannot be stopped.
I will kiss him and then go, I told myself, but I didn’t go.
His hands slid beneath my dress, grazing my skin, squeezing my thighs. Roaming up my back to my neck.
Each movement of his hands felt like it gave my own permission. I felt his arms and shoulders. His chest. The warmth of his skin as my fingers crawled beneath his tunic, brushing the flatness of his stomach.
Let me tell you a secret. It will save you a lot of confusion, especially if you’re someone like a king or queen or commander or priest and there are people you reign over.
When given the chance to feel good, even just a small amount, people take it.
Even if they’ve been told their whole lives not to take it.
They do. Most of the time, they simply hide it.
I say this because you might expect that I would have held off longer from the inevitable.
Looking back, I wish I’d found my way into his arms sooner.
That the moment he’d arrived in my life, I’d stood next to him—as he had tried to do with me—accepting that we needed to be together.