Chapter 8
Ilys had been waking earlier, taking her meals slower, walking longer paths through the gardens just to feel the bite of cold against her cheeks. She laughed more at dinner. Reached for the wine more than once. Let her hand linger at Jorrin’s arm when he passed her the bread.
It had been weeks, but the shadows of the Consecration Rites peered at her behind every corner.
So, she found warmth wherever it would lend itself.
Tonight, the fire in the east wing hearth had burned low.
Only embers now, casting the room in soft rust. She sat with Rowenna on the low-set divan, legs tucked beneath her, sipping a dark and strong port that Baron had smuggled in weeks ago.
Rowenna held a letter. She hadn’t read it aloud. Just skimmed it once, then folded it and left it on the floor beside her cup.
“He says the roads are poor,” Rowenna offered. “Fewer wagons are making it through the forest villages. There’s talk of raids.”
Rowenna looked at her then. Direct, but not probing.
“You’ve been... different,” she said.
“No. You are just preoccupied.” Ilys offered a half-smile, nodding to the letter. Rowenna’s shoulders relaxed a fraction.
“He warns me to be careful,” Rowenna noted.
“I think Leif is afraid,” she added after a while. “Not of rebellion, but of inconvenience. Of disruption. He talks like a man whose parcels might arrive late.”
Ilys glanced at her. “And yet, you’ll marry the curmudgeon.”
Her friend shrugged. “It’s already decided. My opinion would only sour the ceremony.”
That earned a sarcastic breath from Ilys.
She tilted her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
Her body ached faintly in places she didn’t name.
Bruises still bloomed under her robe where the old man had struck her ribs.
Her hands, clean now, still curled instinctively when she dreamed.
She swallowed more of her glass, urging the past away.
Rowenna arched a brow. “I’m worried about you.”
“Rowe…” Ilys groaned, slumping further toward the floor. Her friend only narrowed her eyes, gaze sharp and expectant, silently demanding the truth. At last, Ilys released a breath. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she admitted.
Rowenna smirked tartly. “I assumed you were sneaking off to Jorrin’s loft.”
“I have,” Ilys said. She didn’t bother denying it. There’d be no point. “But I don’t sleep there either.”
Rowenna lifted her cup, a sly little coo escaping. “Oh my.”
Ilys hurled a pillow at her. “Not what you think. He sleeps, and I just lie there, wide awake beside him.”
“Bastard.”
Ilys laughed softly, then let her head tip against Rowenna’s shoulder.
“I’m not what I was,” she said, barely audible.
Rowenna didn’t move. “No,” she replied, “you’re not.”
They sat like that until the fire died, and the walls no longer held any heat.
The sound of fists on flesh echoed through the guard’s training yard.
A crowd had gathered of soldiers, servants, and even a few robed acolytes pretending not to watch. Two men circled each other in the dust, blood already bright at one’s temple. The other grinned through a cracked lip, eyes gleaming with violence, hungry to prove themselves with pain.
Ilys stood at the edge of the cloister, half-shadowed beneath an arch. She hadn’t meant to stop. But her feet had paused on their own.
The first blow landed hard. Wet. A cheer went up. Someone laughed.
Her stomach twisted. The stone beneath her boots felt unsteady, as though the ground itself might tip sideways and spill her into the Hollow Hall again, into blood and breath and twitching limbs. She turned sharply—and ran into Jorrin.
He caught her by the shoulders before she stumbled. “Easy,” he said, low and warm.
Flesh struck flesh in the yard below.
The men circled like dogs, fists raised, teeth bared. One laughed through bloodied lips, eager. The other swung wide, missed, and caught a blow to the ribs.
She looked up at Jorrin, tilting her head.
“I was looking for you,” she said, pretending easy confidence. She pushed the memories down further. “Come.”
His brows lifted slightly, but he followed.
She guided him up the stairwell, her pace unhurried and her posture clean.
When she opened the door to her chambers, she didn’t wait.
She stepped inside, turned to face him, and pressed her mouth to his through the veil before he had time to speak.
His hands rose instinctively, catching her hips.
She pushed him backward until his legs met the edge of the bed.
“I’ve thought about this all day,” she said into the linen between them, her breath warming his lips. “You?”
He nodded. Breathless.
Her fingers lingered at the edge of her veil. For a heartbeat, she faltered, then slipped it back, letting the cloth fall loose.
When she kissed him again, skin to skin, it grew fiercer.
He reached for her like he couldn’t help himself; his palms traced over her sides, her ribs, the dip of her spine.
She guided him to sit, then climbed into his lap.
She kissed him like she had something to prove.
No tremble in her hands. No falter in her grip.
She unfastened his belt with deft fingers, her touch bold and smooth.
When she eased herself onto him, her body resisted—a flash of tight, new pain.
She masked it with a slow exhale and pushed down harder, refusing to waver.
He shifted under her, trying to help her find a rhythm and she copied the movement, rigid at first, then smoother once her body found its place.
Jorrin’s eyes fluttered shut and his hands gripped her thighs, whispering her name with the inflection of the sacred.
But Ilys didn’t close her eyes. She rode him with a kind of devotion utterly removed from love. He watched her with awe. She watched the shadows instead of his face until a sudden, unmistakably new ache pulled her back into her body.
This is mine, she thought. This, at least, is mine.
The memory came suddenly and sharp—
Bodies crumpled on the ground.
She ground down harder, silencing it.
Jorrin kissed her chest. Her neck. She let him.
Keep going. Keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t think.
She gripped the back of his hair. Pulled his mouth to hers. Bit his lower lip just enough to make him feel it.
He came with a groan, spine arching, hands desperate at her waist.
And she didn’t make a sound.
“You are so beautiful,” he whispered into her hair. “So perfect.” He planted kisses down her body while his chest rose and fell against hers, damp with sweat.
Jorrin’s hands were gentle, tracing lazy shapes across her spine, smoothing down her sides. She let them. He curled his arms around her, pulling her close, as though she might slip through him otherwise. His fingers threaded into her hair.
She let him hold her. Let him speak.
Let him love her like she hadn’t buried men with her hands.
By the moon’s late hours she slipped to the kitchen and found a butcher’s knife sunk into half a wheel of salted cheese.
Ilys helped herself to both. She tore bread from the crusted edge of a morning loaf, wedged a bruised pear into the crook of her elbow, and stole a pat of honey-wrapped butter.
Past the painted corridors, down the half-forgotten stairwell where the plaster peeled like sunburned skin, she found the rear cloister doors still cracked for the washmaids to hang linens.
She stepped through them quietly, the stone flagging slick beneath her boots.
Outside, the garden waited. Winter had quieted it. The hedges were skeletal, their spines bent in on themselves. Frost clung to the brittle leaves. Grass folded low to the earth. A false spring sun hung in a dull sky, warming the stone walls.
She picked her way past the broken path, boots sinking into the thawing dirt.
The altar peeked beneath the ash tree, hunched and overgrown, its surface slick with lichen.
She sat cross-legged on it, dropped the food beside her, and bit into the pear.
Juice ran down her wrist. She didn’t bother to wipe it.
The old ache in her ribs hummed beneath the surface, a ghost of the boots and fists and rage. She ignored it.
A sparrow hopped near, beady eyes fixed on her crust of bread.
“Greedy creature,” she said to it dryly, tossing a corner its way.
It dove. She watched it tear the crust.
Only when the sun had dipped lower, painting the dead hedgerows in a rusted sort of gold, did she stir. She stood gingerly, her knees protesting the cold, the bruises. She dusted her hands and turned toward the path home.
A shape darted from the brush—something small, silent, low to the ground.
A rabbit.
It paused near the altar, nose twitching, ears flicking.
Soft gray-brown fur caught the light, the left hind leg tipped in white just like the hare from that winter morning when she was nine and hadn’t yet killed a man.
The one she’d pinned with a trembling hand while Grim’s voice droned instructions she barely heard.
It sniffed the air.
The sparrow’s crust lay torn near her footprint. The rabbit edged closer and began to nibble.
She watched it long and hard.
The light had shifted. Everything looked a little unreal, caught between seasons, caught between past and present. The rabbit didn’t startle, didn’t run. It simply ate, soft jaws moving, body still.
Her throat tightened.
“I’m sorry,” she offered quietly.
The rabbit’s ears twitched. It didn’t lift its head.
She lowered herself back onto the altar stone, resting her weight on her heels.
“I am what I was made to be,” she defended.
The rabbit finished its crust. It gave no judgment. It simply turned and disappeared into the dry grass, vanishing the way small things do. without sound nor fuss.
Ilys stared after it a while longer until the sun set overhead.
Then she rose again, slower this time.
And walked toward the garden gate, where a polished carriage waited like a closed hand.