Chapter Seven #2
I force the door open with some effort. The hinge needs repairing, of course.
I’m grateful that at least his home does not smell of mold or decay.
It’s open to one side with only sailcloth curtains to offer any shelter.
They are currently tied back. A huge loft bed hangs from chains in one corner—large enough to sleep an entire family and heaped with ragged pillows.
Closest to the door is a small makeshift kitchen: a hearth set with wood, a jumble of hanging pots and pans, and a bit of a hutch with a breadboard.
On that side but closer to the window is a rough-hewn table, ship’s chests for benches, and a wall of shelves.
To my horror, someone has filled every inch of the shelves with priceless books. The weather will ruin them. All this wealth of knowledge in sea air and exposed to the elements. It’s a crime.
I am blinking back tears and I cannot say why. I do not think it is for the books.
“Welcome home,” Oke says wryly. He walks to the open side of the wall, leans against the post there, and looks out over the sea. He sounds almost emotional himself when he says, “I declare that what is mine belongs to you. It is yours.”
What a formal way to make the offer. I look around the room, my eyes settling once more on the books.
“Thank you.”
“You should read as many of those as you can.” He’s still looking out over the sea where the sun is sinking low over the water.
Is it truly so late in the day? “And if you’ll heed the will of your new husband, you’ll give me the boon of not sawing off your own fingers and throwing them into the sea. ”
He turns to me and takes my hands in one of his, using the other to gently touch the tip of each finger.
I shiver at his touch and hope he does not notice.
It is a small betrayal of the man I mourn to find the touch of another enticing, but what I long for is not passion, it is arms to hold me while I cry, someone to make the world safe again, someone to make it possible for me to be the Coralys I was just days ago.
His gaze flicks up from my fingers to me and my breath catches at what I see in his eyes. There’s a flicker of something there. Interest. Desire. It is hard to be certain of the depth of the intent, but it is unmistakable.
“I have counted.” Though his actions are needlessly intimate, his expression is grave.
His green eyes have shifted from what flickered before to something very alike to understanding and they make the backs of my legs feel weak for a moment.
Is it a wonderful thing to be seen or a terrible one?
I cannot tell you in this moment. I know only that he does see me somehow in a way I did not yet expect.
“There are ten fingers here. I would like it to remain so.”
“I think I can manage that much,” I say a little more tightly than I would like. My voice is not fully my own.
I steal a surreptitious look at his bleeding wound. With night approaching another bride might anticipate—or fear—the attentions of her new husband. Given how painful his wound seems, I have nothing to fear on that score. Though I am starting to suspect fear would not factor into things.
“How are you supplied here?” I ask.
“I have what I need.” His tone is distracted. “And as for you, you’ll find clothing in the chest nearest the door. Feel free to change out of that stained tunic. There is fresh water in a shell behind the house.”
He nods with his head toward the side of the house I did not see when we approached.
“And bandages?” I ask, lifting my chin and forcing any other thoughts aside for the moment.
“You may object to my desire to help treat your wound, but I have steady hands and at least I can bandage it. It should not be rubbed and dirtied by your clothing. If you do not have it tended, you will surely die. And not even of magic. Of mere human neglect.”
He drops my wrists as if they have burned him, and steps back and curls protectively over his wound like an injured animal.
If he were not such a large, muscled man, I would say he looks wary of me, as if he is trying to protect something vulnerable from an enemy.
I understand the vulnerability, but I am no enemy.
“Leave it be” is all he says, and with that he stalks—or tries to stalk, but there’s a hitch in his step—across to the hanging bed.
He pulls himself up painfully and crawls to the far side of it, hunching around himself like a creature about to lick its wounds.
Fool of a man. If he’d accept my help, he might heal. As it is, I have no confidence that his wound won’t fester. If he wants to die, let that be on his own head. This is the last time I will offer to tend it. I’ve never responded well to stubbornness, and I don’t plan to start bending to it now.
I run a hand over my face. There’s a lamp on the table and a tinderbox. I could light it.
But I’m hungry and there’s no food. I’m tired from the day and worn with a combination of new experiences and jagged sorrow and I find I am suddenly too weary to contemplate anything but sleep.
There may be only one bed, but it’s large enough for my entire royal council. What kind of fisherman has a bed so large? It will certainly suffice for us both. Even if he spends all night in unrelieved physical agony and I spend all night in the emotional equivalent.
Reluctantly, I go outside in the dusky light, creep around the side of the cottage over jagged rocks and soft moss, and I find the place where a giant clam shell larger than any I’ve seen before catches water from a little runnel off the roof.
The water smells fresh. I drink from the shell and then bathe my hands and face.
I wish I could strip off the tunic here and wash myself entirely, but I am not yet so secure as to be willing to parade about the island naked.
I creep back into the cabin. Oke has not moved, but his breath hitches when I enter, so he is not asleep.
I open one of the chests in the fading light with hesitant hope.
There is cloth within as he promised. I draw out the first few things I find.
They are all men’s things—his, if I had to guess.
They are plainly made and large for me. I draw out a tunic made of sailcloth so thin from wear that it’s soft.
It will fall to my knees like the other one did.
It’s clean, however, and smells of some faint spice.
With a surreptitious look over my shoulder to be sure Oke’s back is still turned, I strip out of his ruined tunic and begin to slip on the fresh one. The neck hangs open, falling over one shoulder.
Behind me, a sharp intake of breath makes me freeze and steal a look behind me. Am I wrong, or is Oke trembling a little, his back still to me? I think I am not wrong.
I shake my head as I drag the rest of the tunic over my form and roll the sleeves up to my elbows. He should have let me tend that wound.
But such thoughts are soon forgotten as I slip into the wide bed, far from my new husband.
He does not greet me. We do not touch. But I feel the heat of his body radiating across the space to me as I curl on my own little sliver of bed with my back to him, like two curving maple seeds on the same key.
I bury my face in my hands, and I try to sleep, but what comes instead is a terrible loneliness that cannot be comforted, for there is no Lieve to nestle into.
His warm arm will never drape over me again.
His sleepy kisses will never again decorate my shoulders and neck, and without them I am bereft.
I let myself sob soundlessly into my hands and I think my grief is private until my new husband sits up, making the bed sway, pads across the floor, and steps out into the night.
I sit up, too, worried I’ve angered him, and I wait, wait, wait, until through the open window I see the white sail of his fishing boat by the light of the moon. He’s out on the water and I know he is not returning tonight. I sigh and fall back onto the ragged pillows.
It turns out that plotting revenge and pondering mysteries do not warm the bed the way a husband can. Not even a husband forced to wed a once-queen and wounded in a way beyond considering.