88. Gift

Though we had been discreet in our new happiness, two people took notice or guessed at it and were not pleased.

Firstly, Cian found us praying in the temple early one morning, both us of having lapsed in worship.

I was looking at the wooden face of my goddess, asking her forgiveness for my neglect and also telling her how I was happy.

Alric sat beside me, arms crossed, head bent, eyes closed.

The goddess’s face split open and Cian stepped out.

He swept past us with the coldest expression I had ever seen on his face.

And he became short with me in the following weeks.

It was noticeable enough that Hazel pulled me aside to ask what had passed between us, offering to intervene on my behalf.

Secondly, Vinia stared at my wedding band in the baths through the steam from the water, which was heated from below with more heat than usual from the furnaces to combat the ever colder days.

She tried to speak with Alric in a corridor outside the dining hall.

He was dusty with training yard clay and tired.

I could not read his face from where I was, walking towards the entrance for my last meal of the day.

She reached out to grab his hand and he pulled it out of her reach, behind him.

She was upset and I turned away.

Seeing me would only further increase her distress and my seeing them together was too hurtful.

My husband would not betray me in that way, at least not with his body, even if his heart had been given to her first.

At last, he told me of her himself.

On a cold day of rest, we lay bundled in bed.

I was sitting propped up on pillows and he was reclining in between my legs, the back of his head on my chest, rereading ‘The Vanishing Thunder’ to me.

I loved the free verse poem about a woman who could disappear and flit from world to world.

We shared a cup of tea with whiskey in it.

He paused in his reading and I moved to hand it to him so that he could have a turn with it, but he waved me away.

“Edith, I do not want anything between us,”

he said, closing the book.

Instantly, my bargain with Mother Earth came to my mind.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, there is something I want you to know about my past.”

Surprised, I put my left hand down to cover his heart.

“You may tell me anything you would like to tell me.

If you do not wish to tell me, then I will never need know of it.”

He was silent, his hands tracing the embossing on the slim, leather-bound book.

“I bought this book for a woman.

Half a life ago.”

Her, I thought, my heart sinking, but I said, “Go on.”

“Do you know who Lady Halsted is?”

“The Lady Vinia? Yes, I do.”

He opened the book and closed it.

“We were in love.”

His words gutted me.

I had no justification for any jealousy or anger, but they gutted me.

“I’m listening.”

“I will make my story brief and I will only tell it to you once,”

he said.

“But I want you to know.

I want you to know of it from me.”

“I am listening, husband,”

I said, grateful he could not see the despair on my face.

“The Angler forge used to be out of my mother and father’s old house,”

he began.

“My brothers, especially Anwyn, have made it what it is now.

But then, it was a smaller life.

My father was the son of a fisherman.

He had fire magic and wanted to be a smithy.

His father could or would not pass his boat and business down to his son.

My father has never spoken of it.

In the beginning, my parents had little.

We were never poor, but I certainly had nothing to offer a noblewoman in marriage.

I could not fully swing a hammer when I was a boy and I ran away as boys do.

I worked on a merchant ship that went between Pikestully and The Flavored Three.

But I get seasick too easily.

Then I, oddly enough, worked in a mine outside of Eccleston.

I never made it into the city.

I learned to fight there, on weekends, for coin, despite my being rather thin.

But I missed Tintar.

So I returned to join the infantry in my twentieth winter.

And I met the lady.

I was nothing and I came from nothing, but she loved me and I her.

Her parents, I think, knowing her heart was with someone undeserving, arranged a marriage for her to Halsted.

I asked her to marry me, to elope if she wanted.

At the time, I got it into my head that this book would be a promise of my one day earning enough to keep her comfortable.

But she chose the lord.”

This was a long speech for him and the back of my throat tingled with his admissions.

How easily he made me cry.

“Then I am in her debt,”

I said and kissed the top of his head and swallowed before continuing my speech.

“It grieves me to know that you were heartbroken, but I am glad you are my husband now.”

He gave his little exhale through his nose.

“Always the right thing.

You always say it.”

“I am sorry, Alric,”

I said more sincerely.

“Heartache at that age is like no other.”

He reached back for the tin cup, sitting up to sip from it when he took it from my hand.

I took the cup back from him, wondering if he would tell me all that Isabeau had.

He did.

Reluctance in his voice, he said, “That is not all of it.

I was weak.

I shared her bed after her marriage.

Several times.

And I am forever ashamed of that.”

I said nothing.

“It is likely—”

he began, but stopped.

“It is likely her oldest child is mine.”

Despite Isabeau having told me this already, it hurt.

“I understand,”

I said calmly, my tone veiling the pain inside me.

“I would not wish you to hear of it from anyone else,”

he said.

“And I pray you still look upon me as worthy of you.”

The fact that The Thawing was already only one moon away and our time and my life was drawing to a close had all the more effect on my words.

“There is little you could have done in your past life that I would not forgive.”

I kissed the top of his head again.

He sighed and sat up, lifting my left leg a little so he could sit at the edge of the bed, my legs resting against his back.

He looked at me.

“Do you still like the poem?”

I smiled at him, grateful my tears had not fallen.

Bravely, I said, “You bought it for one woman but fate knew you were truly buying it for another.

Of course, I still like it.”

He turned to lean down and kiss my knee.

“You are a gift to me,”

he said, referencing a conversation we had had earlier that his time of birth would require no gift from me and that he refused to accept anything I gave.

“Let me show you how much of a gift you are.”

He took the cup from me and set it and the book on the floor and began to lift my skirts.

As he began the spells he could cast with those hands, I closed my eyes against the rush of time, the rending of my heart and the coming of the end.