87. Coupling

In those first weeks of true wifehood, I learned that my husband had the capacity for romance.

He could be quite eloquent in the dark, telling me how alluring I had looked on our wedding day, that his frustration at his sentence had almost entirely dissolved at seeing me in white with my abalone blossom crown.

He said the sun through the temple window had shone directly on me like a benediction from Father Fire and he had stumbled in his vows.

He said he had known I was a desirable woman, but he had not let himself look until he was confronted with it in our goddess’s temple.

He said he thought to himself ‘now she is undeniably comely.’ He was also lusty, telling me over and over that he was a man starved, his hunger for me never sated.

After our second coupling with my assurance that I wanted him and not some idea of him, an idea he had held, not I, he was bolder and bolder in bed.

He would kiss my breasts with closed lips, waiting for me to cry out for his tongue and teeth.

At times, he was methodically slow, nearly torturous in his pace to please.

Other times, he would take me roughly and make me forget my own name.

But with every joining of our bodies, he showed me so much care.

It was never enough for him, but only in our rooms or Gareth’s bath.

He was, after all, a private man, as he told me.

If it was the two of us, he wanted to touch and hold, even when lovemaking was not a part of it.

When I read to him, he held my hand or put an arm around me.

When he read to me, he put his head in my lap.

When we slept, some part of us was connected.

But outside our spaces, in the keep, he was his same strait-laced self, which was what I preferred.

I too, was a private woman, I found.

Helena secretly enjoyed Thatcher’s showy overtures, I thought, which made me happy for her.

Perch and Mischa seemed to derive some kind of twisted exhilaration from being cruel to each other outside of his bed.

Alric and I carried on as we had and we liked it that way.

But there were times, in the dining hall, when I felt his eyes on me and if I met them, no muscle in his face moving, his eyes somehow conveyed his restrained ardor.

My face would flush.

I would see that non-smile at the edges of his mouth and I had to drop my gaze to avoid arousal.

He only somewhat gave himself leash on days of rest, when we would, bundled in cloaks, visit the city center, spending more and more time away from our friends.

He would rarely touch me but, as he had in the past, he would often place a quick, guiding hand on my back.

He took me to smaller taverns he liked that served food only they made.

He took me to a secondhand shop when I had explained that I liked those shops in Eccleston, though he seemed to think I only wanted to be frugal, but soon realized how good of condition things could be when discarded by the wealthy.

He took me to one of the few printing presses and told me to buy any book I wanted from their limited shelves.

Around me, customers discussed their weekend business with the printer, and I tried not to turn red at my husband’s telling me that I did not have to worry about the cost as he had already drawn up a bill for me to pay him later.

I still could not bear to pick, so he did for me, a thick volume of selected romances told in Tintarian legends.

Twice that season, we spent a day of rest at the Angler forge.

It was a large building, the ground floor all forge and the second all family housing for Alric’s father and his three older brothers and their wives and children.

Anwyn and Vincent lived nearby in their home and were in attendance as well.

The first visit, I was nervous, but all together, eighteen was a high enough number of people for my concerns to fade.

Dora and Jacinda dragged me into their kitchen on the first visit and began an interrogation that was actually one asking a question and the other woman answering her instead of letting me respond.

They were both vociferous women who had become friends over the course of their marriages and they were happy a third female was an Angler.

Jacinda complained that of the eight grandchildren not one was a girl.

Dora shot her a look and they immediately changed the subject, both assuming correctly that I was barren.

I asked them what Beatrix had been like and they told me she was demanding and even rude but generous of spirit.

They kept adding whiskey to my tea all day and Dora gave me the task of cutting up vegetables for a pot of stew.

At one point, Alric had stuck his head into the kitchen to see me and Jacinda had shouted at him that I needed a break from being married to an Angler man.

Dora had thrown a potato slice at him.

Arriving later than us, Anwyn and Vincent came in to greet me and Anwyn was shooed out as well.

Over his shoulder he had looked at me and mouthed, ‘They’re terrifying.’ Vincent sat next to me and whispered, “They are terrifying, but drunken Angler men are worse because they are obnoxious.

This is better than watching grown men yell at each other over games of horseshoe or straw man’s revenge.”

“And how drunk does my husband get?” I asked.

Vincent smiled at me under the chatter of the two women, picking up a paring knife to assist me and said, “They practically drink shark’s piss, I am certain.

It will make you sick if they offer it to you.

That is why I’m in here with these two.

I would rather have whiskey and tea and their nonstop conversation.”

My husband did get drunk, but not in the lucid, sexual way he had been drunk and light when he had smelled my belly.

He was relaxed, hands on his hips, standing in the forge’s small courtyard, watching a game of horseshoe between Aines and their father.

All of the third generation Angler boys were seated on the other side of the courtyard, on a low wall, watching the game with rapt attention.

The men stood against the wall of the house and they passed a jug between them.

Vincent and I had been kicked out of the kitchen as there were no more tasks to be assigned to us.

“Ah, here’s the bride,”

Arbis cried, holding the jug out to me.

Alric turned from the game to gaze at me.

The liquor had made him, while not expressive, more open in his face and I saw affection in his eyes.

“Leave her be,”

Anwyn said.

“Vincent said he would warn her about our drink.”

“You’re telling me,”

said Arbis, “this woman doesn’t drink? She’s married to that bastard.”

Alric did not acknowledge Arbis, still facing me.

“We have whiskey and tea,”

said Vincent.

“We’re warm and cosy while you have been out here freezing your arses off.”

“Edie, I am curious,”

said Arbis, somewhat slurred, “in bed, does Alric—”

My husband’s looseness turned swiftly to offense and he cuffed the back of his brother’s head.

“Careful how you speak to her.”

Arbis set the jug on a barrel near him.

“You’ll pay for that.”

Anwyn laughed.

“He’s the bloody captain of the Procurers, Arbis.”

“And I used to beat the shit out of him when we were boys.

I’m still much bigger.”

“This is a terrible example for the boys,”

Artho said, nodding towards his sons and nephews seated across the courtyard, but he seemed amused.

Arbis threw a drunken punch at my husband, who dodged it, appearing bored.

“Enough!”

came Frederic’s voice.

“No fighting in front of the lady.”

My father-in-law gave me a grave nod and Aines waved at me.

“See?”

Vincent said to me.

“Obnoxious.

And they are all past forty.

If you can believe it, it is even worse if Thatcher is here.”

On the walk back to the keep, Alric, drowsy and fed, wrapped his cloak around both of us and told me “they like you.”

The second visit was much of the same, but Frederic, their father, had pulled me aside during that second visit, telling me he could see I had ‘been patient’ with his difficult boy.

Alric was thoughtful if he did not know that about himself.

He collected and paid for another crate of Tallowgill and delivered it to Quinn quietly, without my knowing.

I only found out when River thanked me, telling me of his quiet approach to her lover in the hall outside the dormitory, how he asked Quinn to come to him directly when there was a further need.

He bought us a large wolfskin rug made up of several pelts so our feet were not cold on the stone floor.

He brought me leggings and more undershirts to sleep in.

At the end of some days, he would take my braid crown down, undoing it carefully so as not to pull, and massage my scalp and neck when he asked how my day was.

These things meant twice as much to me as any skillful passion.

I had hidden the effects of my courses from him in past moons, but we were too intimate now and when I first had them that winter, he was attentive.

He rested next to me, rubbing my lower back or reading to me.

In the following days, when my pain had subsided, he made love to me over an old blanket, despite my protestations about blood.

Once he realized I was ashamed and not avoiding sex due to pain, he had seduced me, convincing me to let him have me, explaining he did not care about the blood of a woman’s courses.

The night after, he bade me sit on the edge of our bed, skirts pushed to my waist.

When he knelt between my legs, I said, “I still bleed some.”

“Then,”

he said, tone solemn, eyes not on my face, but on what lay before him, “I will taste what my goddess tastes when you are at your prayers.

As I am now at mine.”

After, in the dark, under the covers, I asked if that was blasphemous of him.

He seemed to be unsure of my meaning and, resting his hand on my cheek, he replied with his own question.

“Why would she deny me this altar when she made it?”

Initially, he had pretended Tabitha was a tolerated nuisance.

Eventually, she won him over and I would wake in the middle of the night to her kneading his chest, purring loudly, while, his eyes closed, half asleep, he rubbed her head.

She was our constant companion, napping on the wolf rug if we coupled in bed and joining us at our feet when we finished.

We fed her jerky and fish and kept a tin bowl of water on the floor near the fireplace for her to drink.

Where she shat and pissed, I was unsure, but she never did in our room.

During our first night together, I had managed to avoid being astride him.

I had not ridden a man since Thrush.

Our priest had informed Thrush that any position that gave me pleasure interfered with our conceiving a babe.

Thrush had, offhand, in the carriage ride back from the church, said that it was not a flattering angle for me anyway.

And for nearly a dozen winters, I could not bring myself to do that with any of my lovers.

It was too horrible to remember that rejection from my own spouse.

During our second night of truly sharing a bed, Alric had rolled me on top of him and I had instantly fallen onto his chest saying, “no, no,”

to his surprise.

He had moved me back under him and not interrupted our lovemaking.

But while he held me in his arms afterward, he had said, “You do not want to ride me, wife?”

After a long silence, I had said, “I do not think that I can.”

“Then I will never ask you again.”

“Ask again,”

I had answered.

“One day, someday soon, ask me again.”