Chapter 9 #2
I had wept for an entire phase when Adelaide left, bedbound to my cot as though I’d caught a bout of the pox. But when my mother was offered… I sniffed, swallowing the knotted lump of sorrow back down where I kept it—in the deepest, darkest pit of me.
The Cor Tower loomed to our right, its dark, needled spire nearly piercing the clouds.
It blocked most of the view of eastern Dendra, but if I leaned towards the last of the windows, I could just make out the spire of Capriche’s chappellum and the outer rim of our enclave—infamous for forge smoke, textiles, and a rat problem. Home.
Lost to the view, the sky bled red, then purple, then blue, my last day as living, breathing flesh dimming like a fire’s last ember. The sounds of the chamber congealed into one cacophonous blob: mutterings, sobs, the clink of armour, the puffing of cushions, a squeaking hinge, the thud of a door.
“Admiring the scenery?”
I gasped at the low, familiar voice in my ear. Pawing at my chest, I checked to see if my heart had managed to stay sequestered to my ribs instead of splattered on the parquet, bleeding at my feet.
“By the pits, Demetri.” The growing sense of dread loosened a little, despite the small scare, a cool splash of relief tempering its ache. Demetri was back…just as he’d promised.
Hands knotted at his back, he approached my side, the warmth of his arm pressing into my own.
“You always were a jumpy little thing,” he remarked with a sidelong grin, his profile fixed towards the barbed shadows of the mountains, the red wound of Mount Garnet now black against the horizon.
“You would be too if an irksome boy found pleasure in scaring you.” Hiding in the cubby under our stairs was his favourite haunt. So much so, it was instinct for me to check every morning, long after he and Adelaide had stopped coming. Did the ghost of me follow him, too?
A large hand skimmed across the arc of my cheekbone, shattering the memory. I turned into its touch, its heat.
But he did not stay there, and instead, clasped a section of my hair between thumb and forefinger, the slate grey stark against the soft tan of his skin. Gliding down the strand, his hold remained loose, as if taking care not to tug.
“Gods, I used to pull this rather nastily when we were young, didn’t I?” He chuckled as he rubbed it with the pads of his fingers, just like one does to check the quality of thread. The glass unmisted in the absence of breath, for it appeared my lungs had forgotten how to work.
“It’s a wonder I have any left,” I managed, air filling my chest in one great swell.
Two laurels drifted past us, their heads bent in whispered conversation, bodies pressed even closer than ours.
I surveyed the paxiams, unmoving and unbothered by Demetri’s small touch—a touch that would’ve seen us whipped, or worse, had we been anywhere but inside the templum on the eve of our offering.
“Did you and Osric clear all the necessary air?”
Demetri continued to play with my hair, eyes glazed and unfocused. “Hmm?”
“Osric,” I repeated, wondering if I’d remembered his name right. “Your crusiax friend?”
His fingers stilled. “Ah, yes.” He let me go, positioning the strand to drop over my left breast. “The air between us is as crisp and clear as a winter’s frost. Rest assured that business is done, and I am entirely yours for the rest of the evening, darling girl.”
“And what of the air between us?” I flung the hair he’d been toying with over my shoulder.
“What of it?” His brow creased, eyes flickering between mine.
I almost scoffed. “Does it not clog your lungs? Is it just me who feels this cloy between us, like smoke?” I matched his discerning gaze, hunting for any hint of resentment or conflict.
It would be justified. The brown of his irises deepened, growing darker.
“Eight cycles, Demetri. Eight cycles, and the last time I saw you, I couldn’t even—”
“Do not speak of it.” A firm finger pressed to my parted lips, stoppering the words about to spill. I resisted the urge to nip at it, batting him away instead.
“No, Demetri. I must—”
“Ashara.” He tucked another strand of wayward hair behind my ear.
Goosebumps rose like spring buds across the base of my skull, and once more, my words disintegrated to nothing.
“You could have been the one to hold the whip itself, and still, I would not have forsaken you. Even now, all I can think about is how blessed it is, a rare gift from our most callous Maker, to see you one last time. That at least we might fulfil our promise to be together at the end. As we were meant to…as it should be.”
The promise.
Heart attempting to make another jump to the floor, I placed a slightly trembling hand over his that now cupped the side of my face.
“It is a surprise that our minds can do anything but fixate on how it is to happen,” I admitted.
“How the rising moon will be our last, how every laurel here shall be worms-meal in a matter of turns.” I allowed myself the indulgence of glancing at his full mouth before my attention slipped to the rounded orb that bobbed at the centre of his throat.
Would they slit it?
“It is no surprise to me, at all,” he replied, drawing my gaze back to his.
His hand lowered, grabbing my wrist and tugging me closer.
Mouth inches from my ear, his breath dusted its shell.
“Distraction is an art form, and we have mastered it from the very beginning. Who am I to fight human nature?”
A distraction. A word not big enough for all that Demetri and I once were.
I glanced down at the narrow cavern of space between our bodies, each inhale drawing us closer.
My fingers drifted to the hem of his shirt, tracing the stitching, wondering if it was the same I’d tailored for him all those cycles ago.
“Demetri, what’s this?”
His head snapped down to where I’d stretched out his shirt, presenting him with the view of the three crimson blotches marring the bottom of it.
“By the First, is that blood?”
Demetri’s curls bobbed as his head spun, face angling towards where the paxiams guarded the doors to the hallway and latrines.
“Hush,” he chided, loosening his belt to tuck the shirt into the band of his breeches.
“Or they’ll award me a penance for desecrating my offering garb.
” Stains hidden, he tightened the buckle, centring it.
“Cotton, wool, linen…it’ll all be dyed red come the ‘morrow.” I huffed a laugh. “You’ve just had a head start. Where did you—”
“Tavern fight,” he answered, voice quiet.
“Attempted to drown the sorrows in five tankards of ale and half a flagon of mead.” My head dipped, hands settling on my hips.
But of course. “Unfortunately, it incensed rather than dulled, and I may have broken a nose or two. Only the ones already crooked, of course.”
Had I been a man, free to haunt a tavern’s threshold without reprisal, I might have done the same. I nodded, wetting my lips, ready to ask who had been fortunate enough to find themselves on the receiving end of Demetri’s eager fist.
“Are you still untouched, Ashara?”
Of all the words to fall from his mouth, I hadn’t expected those. Inhaling saliva instead of air, I choked on the glob of it, lungs rattling.
“Yes.” My eyes watered, mind reeling. “How could I not be?” After what had happened, after everything…
A part of me wanted to tear at my bodice, to show him the marks on my back that no doubt matched his own.
Had he forgotten they were there? Something dropped into the pit of my stomach.
What Demetri and I once had was a ghost. Something immaterial, lost to time.
Of course he may have had another woman, another secret.
How easy it was to hide small sins from the Dendralis when something dangled between your legs.
“Are you?” I asked, wanting and not wanting to know in equal measure.
His eyes shuttered. “I kept my promises in all the ways that count. Every one of them.”
I looked at him then, truly looked. At the shadow of a beard sharpening the jaw that was once boyishly round. At his straight, handsome nose. The dimples. The set of his features—honest, determined—fixed entirely on me.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
“Promises can be broken, Demetri. They’re words, not iron.”
Something eased in him, the muscles in his cheeks falling slack. “To me they are.”
He inched closer, the familiar char of smoke and cherry wine clinging to his clothes.
“You’ll have to excuse the forwardness of my next ones, though,” he murmured, voice low. My back tingled, the urge to run warring with that addictive anticipation, the type that swirled deep within some hidden part of me.
“I have waited eight painstaking winters to see you again, and now, we have only a handful of turns left,” he continued.
Our eyes collided, canopy meeting bark.
“I want to make good on the promise we made to one another.” Disarmed by his confession, I fought the urge to look away.
“I want to spend my last moments as a living, breathing thing wrapped in your arms and buried so deep inside you that neither of us knows where one begins and the other ends. I want to be with you in the way I have always longed to be. The way that was denied to us.”
I allowed his words to sink and settle into my heart, like honey in a pot. He hovered so close that the tips of our noses brushed, our breaths mingling and ghosting the pane to our right.
“But if you do not wish to do that, to exist beside you would be enough. To talk, to laugh, to cry. To sit in godsdamned silence until the sun rises. I’ll take any scrap you wish to give me.”
Scraps. Morsels. Crumbs. It’s all we’d ever had.
“I tire of scraps.” The words rose instinctually, forming before I had the sense to swallow them.
His chest jerked, rising with a sharp intake of breath.
Snaking around my waist, his hands cupped my ribs, squeezing with the kind of desperation I knew only too well.
“Then, if you allow it, I will treat you with a tenderness such as you’ve never known this last night.
I will make it my last act in this godsforsaken world to ensure your final turns are filled with nothing but pleasure.
It would be a life well lived to have you keening in my ear until the break of dawn. ”
“Demetri,” I protested and begged, hands knotting into his sleeves to push him away, to pull him closer.
Lips quirking, his face cracked into a smile—the kind of smile that was no small sin. Arms tightening, he embraced me, our bodies settling into the shape of one another as if carved from the same slab. A spectacle. A blasphemous monument.
I was on fire, though it was the right sort.
“Or…” he murmured against the crease of my jaw, sending a tremor rippling through me, “would you rather it fast and hard until you scream so loud the First shatters upon the dais? Not my preference, not with an audience, but I’ll be whatever you need for this final night.
” He drew back, just enough for me to note the rise of his brow, awaiting my answer.
A rush of icy heat spilled from my temple, sliding down my neck, my chest, only to pool low between my thighs.
“Just be mine,” I decided. “Just this once. Just this night. All mine.” My hands swept up to his shoulders, gripping them as tightly as he held me.
“I always have been,” he breathed, shaking his head. Angling closer, he aligned his mouth to mine, lips hovering over my own. “Eight cycles are but seconds in the eyes of eternity. I’m yours, Ashara, and I always will be.”
And then, for the first time in an age—for the first time since the smith yard, since the whip, since the inquisition—Demetri kissed me.