8. 7 #2
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Annie.”
I smiled despite the weirdness of the man, and addressed him with a Meldoran greeting. “I hope your family is as well as you look today.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Full of surprises.” His own Meldoran was lilting and accented.
I appraised him. “That’s your real name, isn’t it?”
He paused, and then nodded. “There are people to whom that name is valuable. Keep it quiet.”
“Good thing I know no one, then.”
Vasile smirked, and leaned back into the shadows. “Goodbye, fopdoodle.”
I turned, and found Robar at the bar. Good, he hadn’t left. I weaved through the crowded tables, avoiding a grabbing hand and a call for an ale. I was getting used to the smell, though I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
At the bar, I realised he was having another hushed chat with the barman. Something about a tab, which I didn’t catch much more of. I didn't want our moment to be plagued by this tense conversation, so I waited for him to finish, standing to one side.
Until he turned with his three ales towards me.
Now. His eyes fell on me.
Now was my moment.
With a beating heart and shaking hands, I pushed the hood of my cloak back.
I shook out my dark hair as I had that first night, letting it settle over my shoulders.
I wore my yellow peplos underneath. The style was falling out of fashion now, and only those at the Houses tended to wear them. It had to help him remember.
This was it.
He stood before me, barely looking at me.
I would tell him everything. The words burnt on my tongue, ready to spill out. I had thought on this moment for days. Do you know the fable of Hephus and the sisters? That would be the opening. Engaging, maybe even a little flirtatious.
In the window of his confusion, I would tell him the details.
How Hephus had been betrothed to Ifrit, the elder sister.
How the younger sister, Elfran, had been jealous of the match and prayed to Ekris to make him forget Ifrit so she could seduce Hephus instead.
But when Ekris arrived and saw the jealous sister, he wanted her for himself.
So instead, he made her family forget her entirely, and gave her the kiss of death to join him in the afterlife.
After the tale, when Robar was looking at me with his full attention, I would tell him that we were once in love. I would ask him if he remembered finding himself outside of the House of Love, with no explanation, and seeing a strange woman.
I would connect it all. Explain it all.
I opened my mouth.
Then, he took another step towards, no, into, me, and I was forced to take a step back as ale slopped over the side and across my cloak.
Robar shuffled forwards. “Excuse me.”
I breathed out, the first words he had properly spoken to me since the night that was to be our wedding. Now, I let his brief words fall over me. I blinked up at him from under my lashes. “Yes, of course.”
He narrowed his eyes, looking for something. A flicker of recognition passed over them, and I felt saved. A painted drowning woman finding her painted knight.
“Do I know you?” Robar asked from his lovely peony mouth.
My heart leapt. “Um,” I started, badly. Then, I blushed. “Well, you don’t exactly—”
“You work here?” he cut in.
What? I glanced down at myself. “No.”
Robar watched me, and I saw the light of that recognition fade to boredom. Impatience. “Right, well. Can I—?”
He gestured to the space between us with the ales in his hands, then nodded in the direction of his friends.
Mortification was a fast acting poison, indeed. I was in his way. That was all I was. My gut churned.
I bit my lip to hold back the wobble, and I nodded. “Sorry. Yes.”
I stepped to the side, and he stepped past me as the spilt ale created a cold patch against my chest.
Ekris above. I was lost. I was entirely lost.
I looked up, taking a couple of deep breaths. I could not face the shame of returning to Vasile. Then I realised Robar and his friends were only just behind me.
I didn’t want to be standing here like a bloody fopdoodle. What was I doing? What could I do?
Pulling my hood back up, I dropped down into a vacant seat on a nearby bench and wallowed in my loss. I didn’t even have a prop anymore, and I kept my head down to avoid the curious glances of the two groups nearest to me.
Then I heard a voice behind me. Moreover, I heard a name. I was sitting close enough to hear them.
“Who were you chatting up, Robbie?”
The speaker was a voice I didn’t know. One of the two men with Robar. Or Robbie, apparently. I hardly knew him, then. He had never told me his friends called him that. Robbie, Robbie. Did I like it? I wasn’t sure. It made him younger.
“What?” my betrothed replied.
Can one still be a betrothed if they don’t know you exist? The answer was probably no, but I had suffered enough losses today.
“The girl over there.”
I tensed further, rounding my shoulders against the recognition I had once craved.
But it didn’t seem as if Robar had even turned around; his reply came immediately and with the smotherings to indicate he hadn’t moved. “No clue, she was acting weird.”
The man hummed. “Probably drunk.”
Robar laughed. “Off her head, surely.”
To be so summarily dismissed by a man who had once claimed to love me tested the very definition of galling. If the floor could swallow me, I would have bid it to, then. I envied the painted drowning woman for her escape.
“Have you been to the House again?” the other man asked him. His voice was lower, and he kept his volume low, too.
My skin ran cold.
“Why do you keep asking me that?” Robar replied. He did not mind his own volume.
“Well, have you?”
“It’s none of your business,” he replied. “I don't even remember telling you I ever went there. The ale must have fogged my mind.”
“That’s a yes, then. The same woman?” That was the first man again, I was pretty sure.
“Same as who?” Robar responded, clearly aggravated.
There was a brief pause, and I reminded myself to breathe.
A swell of hope had risen in my chest at the fact he had spoken about me to his friends.
They knew me. Or, of me. I wondered what he had told them.
Had he been to the House of Love since he forgot me?
Maybe there was a small part of him that remembered me.
“I don’t get it, Robbie,” the first man said. “A few weeks ago, you’re in here, talking about some obsessed Ekrissian who is completely in love with you, and now you’re acting like she never existed. Are you protecting her?”
Protecting me? From what? Their jokes? I would have sat there and taken any mockery or comment. Protecting me from the marriage I still wanted? How would his forgetting of me benefit me? There was nothing to this protection but loneliness and heartache.
Robar let out a groan. “I’m not protecting anything. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I heard it, too,” the second guy chimed in.
Whatever Ekris had done, his curse of forgetting had only extended as far as Robar himself.
He must have told his friends about me, and now had no memory of the conversation.
There was something validating about that, to know that I was not the only person with a memory of our time together, as much as he now denied me.
“Look, maybe I was drunk,” he said.
“So you lied to us? You know we told Granville,” the first guy hissed.
“What?” Robar exclaimed. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
Someone shushed him. Though I had the exact same question. Why would anyone else have an interest in my relationship with Robar?
“You said it was all but done,” the first man grumbled. “He asked, we told him. Now all of that was drunken nonsense?”
“I don’t know what the fuck I said.”
I didn’t feel like I was really a person. The table around me laughed and sang and clunked clay together. I waited to be hurt again, another ghost ignored by him.
“But there is an Ekrissian now.”
“Yes, I’ll see her again this week,” Robar replied.
Oh.
“Do you think she likes you?” the second guy asked.
Robar let out a gruff, choking laugh. “It certainly sounded like it.”
My stomach fell out from under me, like I had stumbled from a ledge, but the ground hadn’t moved. I stared at the table with disbelieving eyes as my ears rang and my breath hitched.
That image again: Robar looking down at me as I pleasured him. Only it wasn’t me. It was one of the girls at the House. One of my friends, until Ekris cast me out. When he thought of pleasure, he thought of her. When he thought of my House, she was its face.
I thought I might be sick. The smell of the bar filled my nostrils anew, and my gut rolled.
Enough.
I had to leave.
“That’s gotta be the greatest glory a man can claim. An Ekrissian of one’s own.” The second guy lamented it like it was a song, and not the entire destruction of my life.
“A Robarrian,” the first guy joked.
They all laughed.
“Disgusting,” the second guy sniggered. “What’s there to worship anyway?”
I stood and extricated myself from between the two heavy set men either side of me.
“His dear old dad’s coffers,” the first guy said.
I pulled my cloak around to cover the side of my face and quickly smoothed my dress down, moving away before I threw up on Robar.
I caught a final glimpse as one of them shoved Robar’s shoulder. “If only they knew, eh!”
Then I was pushing past the patrons and spilling out into the stale air of the night, which had never tasted so fresh. I threw up against the steps, and endured the laughter of two passersby as they called me a drunk.
I had thought things could not get worse. If there was a bottom to this well, I clearly hadn’t found it yet.