19. The Letter

Chapter 19

The Letter

M ariel was a woman possessed, propelled by the aimless despair of the lost. As she traveled from the stones to the brush to the sand, she rode the rhythm of her beleaguered breaths.

Her world had started spinning the day she’d married Erran. Even her identity no longer belonged to her. The princeling had been a means to an end, and she hadn’t once forgotten herself until the island. That cursed island, where everything had been the opposite of what it should, a world turned on its head and shaken until it was unrecognizable.

I need to be reminded of who I am and who I am not, she told herself as she slowed, nearing the jagged formation of rocks that had been the backdrop for the best moments of Erran’s life. Someone had once told her a person always returned to the place of their greatest contentment, and he’d gone there that very afternoon with Yesenia, unable to resist the past for even a day.

Mariel couldn’t compete. She didn’t want to. Only in confronting her pain could she be rid of it altogether and return to the rightful path her life had been meant to take before she’d allowed her heart the pointless, painful detour.

She climbed carefully over the sharp boulders marking the entrance, almost disappointed when none cut her. Nothing signified life more than blood, the capacity to bleed. As a young lass, starving and watching her loved ones diminish by the day, she’d dig her nails to her thighs on her worst days, replacing one pain for another—a safer pain to mask the dark and terrible one from which there was no escape.

A pain caused by the Rutlands.

Her woes had come full circle, and it was a cruel twist of fate that her present agony was architected by her own weakness.

Mariel traced her hands along the walls. Was it there, she wondered, or there? Where had he pressed Yesenia to the rocks when he couldn’t temper his lust another moment? Where had she lifted her skirt and invited him in?

Everywhere , her heart decided. The place radiated with the birth and death of Erran’s happiness.

“Mar.” Erran’s boots screeched as he slid, wobbling for balance. “Mariel, stop. Stop and look at me.”

So he’d followed her. Of course he had, for if he hadn’t, then his obscene showing in the banquet would seem as disingenuous as it had been. The entire trip had been a rehabilitation campaign for him, and he’d won. He’d won them all over, and she shouldn’t have cared. She shouldn’t have cared a whit.

“Mariel, please. We really, really need to talk.”

Her head shook because words were too hard.

“This distance forming between us... I hate it. I absolutely hate it, and I know... I haven’t been myself here, and I know you see it.”

Mariel keeled over a crag, unable to breathe more than stunted inhales, her exhales even more defiant. But if she said nothing, maybe he’d go away.

“What I said on the island was true. It ken it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.”

“Then you are a professional liar, aye? You had me fooled for a while, but ah...” Mariel couldn’t hold her tongue anymore. “Is it a Rutland trait, or is that one all your own?”

“I need you to hear me.” Erran’s boots squished on the wet rocks. “You owe me this much.”

Mariel spun around, sputtering through a fit of false starts before finally saying, “Owe you? Owe you ?”

“This isn’t about my father, Mariel. It’s about us , about two people who couldn’t be more different, who found something in each other that they couldn’t find alone.” He looked like a sad little boy who’d had his favorite toy taken away, which seemed fitting, because that was all she’d been. His latest toy. “I don’t believe it was only true out there.”

“Why...” Mariel folded her arms around her, wishing it were enough to protect her from everything she shouldn’t be feeling. “Do you want me to tell everyone what you said in there is true? Aye, I will. I’ll lie for you if you’ll just... just leave me alone.”

“Lie... Mariel.” His pursed smile was full of sadness. “Mariel. I know you don’t believe that.”

Mariel wiped her eyes and stormed over. “You don’t have to play the fool with me, Errandil. I ken when it’s just the two of us, you can be exactly who you feckin’ are, and have been all along.”

“ Stop using my name as a weapon! It hurts me exactly as badly as you think it does.” Erran surged forward, and she stepped back an equal distance. “I shouldn’t have been so caught off guard seeing her yesterday, but there were all these eyes, this pressure of everyone expecting and maybe even hoping I’d make a fool of myself, and I froze. I’m not making excuses, only trying to help you see what might not have been obvious—and something I certainly didn’t help by not talking to you about it before we even arrived. But nothing has changed for me.”

“You’re still going to pretend? Even now, you can’t be honest with me. I heard you!”

Erran thrust his hands out to his sides with a bewildered gape. “Heard me what?”

“You and Yesenia. Here. Right feckin’ here, where I’m standing.” She slammed one boot onto the wet stone. Water splashed up around her ankle. “Likely other things as well, but I didn’t stay around to find out.”

“Me and Yesenia?” Erran took a deep breath. His hand traveled to his chin as he tilted his head upward. “If you heard us, then you’d know you’re making all the wrong assumptions here.”

“How she intimidates your craven little wife, aye? And you’ll always be extra special to each other? Those assumptions?”

Erran’s eyes closed. He went quiet, one hand traveling to his chest, sliding under his overcoat. He sighed. “I was looking for you . She found me first, said she wanted to talk. She apologized for how things ended, and aye... Aye, I ken she will always be special to me. I shouldn’t have come here with her. I know that. But how could you... Why would you pick and choose my words to hurt yourself? Because I also told her I was happy . With you . And that even if she hadn’t left as she did, it wouldn’t have lasted, me and her. I believe that. Because there’s lust and then there’s...” His voice choked as he withdrew his hand from his jacket, pulling out a folded piece of vellum. “Read this.”

“I’m not—” Mariel swallowed. “Nay.”

He thrust it again. “Read it, Mariel. If anything we went through on the island meant... If it meant to you what it did to me, you’ll read this and then decide how you think I feel.”

Mariel leaned forward and snatched it from his hand, then spun back toward the sea before he could see through her tears... read more of her pain. She unfolded the paper, and the first words she read were Dearest Yesenia. “ Ah . Nay, I will not ?—”

“It isn’t what you think. Read it.”

She snapped the paper in her hand, shooting him a final glare before shifting her eyes downward.

Dearest Yesenia,

This is all I never got to say. I didn’t know myself then. I know myself better now.

Forgive me for my behavior the last time we saw each other. I was not myself then either.

I cared about you. Maybe even loved you. But those feelings were the last hurrah of childhood, which I’d been clinging to, harder than I should have. Losing you was the push I needed to be the man my father trained me to be.

I know this now, because I’ve given my heart away, and this time there’ll be no getting it back. If someone or something takes my beloved wife from me, a piece of me will go with her. With hindsight, I see the two feelings are incomparable.

I don’t want to hurt you with my words. I only tell you this so you no longer live in fear of me showing up one day to your ugly mansion in the trees to convince you to come home with me. You’re exactly where you should be. I am too.

Your mate,

Erran

Mariel refolded the letter. Her hand shook as she tried to hand it back, but it slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the ground. Erran made no move for it.

“I planned to give it to her, but...” He shook his head. “I said what I needed, just with different words.”

Her composure had deteriorated with every line she’d read, but she didn’t realize she was hyperventilating until Erran rushed over and bundled her into his arms. He guided her to a boulder. “Breathe.” He ran a hand down her back and kissed the top of her head. “Just breathe.”

Mariel couldn’t say for certain which word or line had done it, but something inside her had broken. It was everything at once, everything she’d believed in and everything she’d ever been. All she could do was bury her face in her hands and cry.

Erran lowered to a crouch and peeled her hands away, looking up at her with an expression so tender, she sobbed harder. “I love you, Mariel.”

Mariel could hardly see him. Tears slid over her lips, landing in the washed-up sea. I love you as well was on the tip of her tongue, but what came out was “why?”

Erran laughed. “You’re a hopeless romantic, aren’t you?”

“Why, Erran?” She squeezed her eyes and wiped them on her bare arm. “Because I’m like her?”

Disappointment flickered in his gaze as he lifted her hands to his mouth. “You’re not, actually. You’re... just as maddening at times, I ken, but there’s a warmth to you that makes me feel...” His throat bobbed. “Like I’m home. You’ve been putting others first for so long, you can’t see how much you’ve been holding onto, how much love lives within you. But I see it, and I feel it. And since I’m in a confessing mood, here’s another one for you.” He gripped her hands tighter. “I wish we were still on the island. You’d be in my arms, and the world would feel right again.”

Words of resistance formed in her chest, all the ways she could fight back, weaponize everything he was saying until it was nothing but another way of pushing her back down and into the sinking sand, where she was safe in the misery of her anger and sadness. Where all he’d done and was, every beautiful and maddening thing about him, belonged to her wounded parts and was no longer fresh and alive and taking up all the space of her delicate heart.

She pulled one of her hands from his and lifted it to his face. Tremors kept it from landing soundly, so he placed a hand over hers and locked it there with a short, sweet smile.

When her words failed her a second time, Mariel instead leaned down to kiss him. Her lips skirted his in the last of her uncertainty, the part of her still hanging onto the comfort of loss. But she knew—she knew. She knew, and that was the only reason it had hurt as badly as it had, because only love could break her so soundly and put her right back together, but in an order that finally made sense.

Everything, finally, made sense.

Mariel wrapped her arms tightly around his neck in her desperation to eradicate any distance left between them. It was hard to tell whose tongue was whose—who was more demanding—when they couldn’t get close enough to satisfy the famishment burning through them.

“Not here,” he said. He took her by the hand and led her out of the cove through the sea entrance. Their boots sank into the sucking sand, pulled by the ebbing tide, but he tugged her around the bend and up onto the dry part.

Mariel watched him lay his bespoke tailored jacket onto the sand and then he lowered her onto it. He peeled away his layers, the last of the sun’s light coloring his tan skin with a peachy glow that brought her back to the most peaceful days of her life.

Erran helped her unlace her untenable gown. It took so long, they both laughed, but all amusement left his eyes when he climbed over her. He paused, his chest rising and falling, and just looked at her.

“Do you trust me, Mariel?” he asked. “What I said in my letter, do you believe it?”

Mariel nodded.

“Do you love me?”

More tears beaded. She bit her lip. Nodded.

Their bodies connected, sealing his questions. Her answer. As he moved in her, she saw the life she could have, the life she would have if she’d stop getting in her own way. Fate had brought her into a marriage with a man she was supposed to hate, but fate had nothing to do with how she loved him or how he loved her.

She wrapped herself around him, their flesh and souls becoming one, born anew of something far more terrifying and fulfilling than the armor she’d worn for so much of her life.

Mariel watched the sun set behind him and finally let go.

After, he held her until dusk became darkness.

When it was time to go back, he returned to the cove and came back with the letter. He tore it into pieces, glancing back at Mariel before walking the remnants to the sea, where he scattered them.

“All you need to know is in here,” he said, tapping his chest.

Mariel’s words splintered. “All right.”

“We can be whoever we want to be, Mariel. But being ourselves works just as well.”

“If you ever...” Her mouth pursed.

“I won’t. I swear to you.” He took her hand in his and kissed it. “If you ever...”

“I won’t.” It was her turn to kiss his hand.

“We’ll go in the back way.” He grinned. “Quicker path to our bedchamber.”

Hand in hand, they returned to the keep. With the night coming alive and the warm sand sifting between his toes, Erran had never known such peace. Such resolve. Mariel and me. My wife.

When she asked again why he hadn’t given the letter to Yesenia, there was no accusation interspersing the question. She was simply curious.

“I ken I didn’t write it for her at all,” he said, after some thought. “I wrote it for you.”

“Aye?”

He snapped her close to kiss her. Her contented titter lit up his entire soul. “Just didn’t know it at the time.”

“And the speech? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Are you having a go at my woeful public speaking?”

Mariel laughed. “You know what I’m asking.”

Erran shrugged. “I didn’t know how to talk to you, and it seemed like another way to try.”

She drew her mouth into a scowl. “By saying all that in front of Guardians and all?”

“And why shouldn’t they all hear about how a man loves his wife?” Erran pulsed his squeeze on her hand.

“So it had nothing to do with this campaign to make everyone forget what happened last time you were here?”

“I’d as soon forget it all myself,” Erran said, half under his breath. He filled his lungs with comforting sea air. “I didn’t think about it when I was doing it. Others can take my words however they wish. They were only meant for one person.”

As they neared the tall reeds separating land from shore, Mariel slowed. “Erran, do you really think the two of us... knowing what you know about me, how I came to be your wife... Do you truly suppose there’s a future for us? An honest one?”

“I could ask you the same,” he replied. “After all that’s been done to you and yours by me and mine.”

“I still don’t know what to do about that.” Mariel pulled to a stop. She released his hand and gazed at the brush. “You’re not your father. I know it. I don’t see you like that. But he’s my family now too. And how can I look my people in the eyes again, having joined myself to our subjugators without actually changing anything?”

Erran had been thinking about this very thing, ever since she’d told him the whole story. She might never see her father as he did, which was understandable. Rylahn was not an evil man. He was a businessman, sometimes ruthless and likely thoughtless. Yet if this were true, it should not trouble him to give back what shouldn’t have been his to begin with. And Erran wasn’t confident his father would do such a thing, even after hearing all Mariel and her people had been through.

“Do you trust me to figure it out?”

Mariel cast her eyes to the side in thought. After a sigh, she nodded. “I trust you to try.”

Erran brushed a gentle kiss across her lips. “Give me some time with it.”

She stretched a hand up to his face. “Don’t expect an apology about today. But I’m glad I was wrong.”

Erran chuckled. “Is that nay the same thing?”

“I assure you, it is not.” Her face contorted to suppress a grin.

“Well, I will apologize, for not talking to you about how I was feeling about coming here again. Truth was I wasn’t looking forward to dredging the past. I hadn’t thought about her at all since you and I...” He sighed. “It brought a lot back for me, and not all good. I’m sorry for not just saying so. I should’ve told you how I felt before we came here.”

She nodded. “We’ll get better at this.”

It hadn’t escaped him that Mariel had yet to say the words herself. I love you. She’d nodded when he’d asked, but it wasn’t the same. Still, it had to be harder for her. Even he could see that. For all she’d confessed to doing, her motivations for her transgressions had been selflessness. Justice. The Rutlands had fattened their coffers at the great expense of others, and were still doing so. Their battles were not the same.

All he could do was give her time.

Nay, it’s not all you can do, but the rest will be much harder.

“Erran?”

He broke his daze. “Aye?”

“I don’t know the way back to our apartments.”

“Oh!” He laughed and linked their hands again. “That eager to jump me, are you?”

“Or to be out of this cursed gown,” she muttered, lifting the sand-covered fabric with a disgusted look.

“Aww.” Erran kissed her again. “You look beautiful tonight.”

Mariel made a raspberry noise.

“Beautiful,” he said again.

She made the sound again, louder.

“Feckin’ stunning ,” he growled and swept her into his arms. Her euphoric giggle melted him. “Hope you’re not too tired, outlaw.”

Mariel was aching for the water steaming from the tub. Erran had called for it after she’d said they should consider not sleeping in sand, but it wasn’t even about being clean. She needed the warm embrace after the emotional turmoil of the past days.

She stood naked in front of the long oval mirror rimmed with gold. Her reflection had always been a curious thing to her, for all her indifference to it. She’d come of age young and hadn’t needed to worry about whether her hips were agreeable or whether suitors would be attracted or repelled. But her breasts were her singular insecurity. On an otherwise muscular frame, they were unnecessarily large and served no useful function in her endeavors. But until recently, her aversion had been mostly practical. Every piece of clothing Mariel had ever owned Augustine had had to tailor to make space for them. They perpetually got in the way, especially when she was using her bow. After a long day, her back hurt more than it should have, for her age. But like all burdens she’d borne for years, she’d learned to live with this one too.

She turned left... right, giving them more thought in the past five minutes than the past five years, and wondered whether such eyesores were pleasing to a man like Erran, or some unavoidable obstacle to work around as she’d always seen them. He’d given no sign one way or another. It was not a part of her he’d explored.

She lifted them in her palms, as she often did at the end of the day, relishing the immediate relief from taking the weight off her frame.

The door to the privy room opened. Mariel scrambled for her towel, but Erran lunged forward and steered her hand away. With his foot, he closed the door.

“Why would you hide yourself?” He resecured the towel on the hook and moved around to the back of her. “From me?”

Mariel shook her head at her reflection. She looked the proper fool standing naked, her hands crossed over her chest like a maiden caught unawares by a lake. His watching her worsened the bewildering shame.

One at a time, he peeled her hands away and laid them at her sides. She struggled through a breath, then held it as his hands replaced hers, cupping her breasts in his broad, strong palms. Hands that had touched her everywhere. Everywhere but there.

“My Mariel,” he whispered before dipping down to kiss her neck. “Volemthe.”

“I don’t know that word.” She fought every urge within her to look away. Nothing about her marriage had been easy, but his skill at finding his way past her defenses, of seeing her and knowing her, was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

“It’s a Vjestik word. It means I love you. I’ve picked up a few things in my travels.” He brushed her hair to the side and kissed her crown. “I can say it in other languages, if you like.”

Oh, yes, she thought, drawing her tongue along the back of her teeth. The foreign word, the accent... What a mystery he still was. In a world where she’d been most at ease when everything around her was known, she hadn’t dreamed of how exciting it might be to live for the unexpected.

Erran’s thumbs traced her nipples, sending her eyes rolling back. “Look at yourself, Mariel. Really look at yourself. See what I see, and you would never feel like you did when I walked in, ever again.” He bent down and took a nipple in his mouth. Hot desire coursed through her. “Every time I look at you now, I feel this... this thought: she’s mine, she belongs to me . But you belong to no one. It’s I who belongs to you.”

Mariel spun around and leaped into his arms. “You’re half right, princeling.”

“Mm.” His fingers spread across her bare ass as he held her higher. “Which part?”

“Join me in this bath,” she said between the safety of his kisses. “And maybe I’ll tell you.”

Mariel dreaded their pending departure. Not the leaving part, as she couldn’t get out of Warwicktown faster. It was the good-bye itself, having to look everyone in the eye and pretend she felt no humiliation. She was adept at hiding her true self when she was the Flame, but that cool subtlety existed nowhere in Mariel herself.

It was a good morning to leave. They’d picked fair weather, and the soft-enough coastal breeze would keep them comfortable without waylaying them too far inland.

Mariel was the last to approach the farewell line, after Erran. Khallum leaned in to embrace her and whispered, “Don’t ye dare break his heart.” He kissed the side of her head. “Told him the same.”

She smiled as she moved on to Gwyn and Korah, both women talking over each other through their insistence she was welcome anytime.

“Yesenia, it was lovely to see you again,” Erran said, just ahead. He chastely kissed her cheek before moving on.

“It was... nice to finally make your acquaintance,” Mariel said when it was her turn. She’d practiced the words, but they had the soreness of a still-healing wound.

Yesenia chortled. She looked as radiant as she had every day of the trip, her hair full and flowing, her masculine fashion giving her a dangerous sexuality even Mariel could concede was appealing. “Ye donnae mean it. And I ken I wouldnae either, were I you.”

Mariel lowered her eyes with a laugh. “Aye. All right.”

“It was good to meet you, Mariel, if only so I could see Erran will be fine, more than fine. He’s where he was meant to be all along.”

“He is. I won’t let him forget it.” Mariel left it at that, moving on.

Corin offered a sympathetic smile and a hug that seemed out of place, mumbling something about doing it again sometime, but she was glad for his understated good-bye. Glad her last memory of the place was the restrained comradery of someone who understood how something that could no longer hurt them could still be painful—maybe the only one who could.

Sessaly opted to ride with her parents on the return, likely on account of the whispers she’d been seen a bit too much with her brother-in-law.

“Are you going to tell us about...” Mariel nodded at the carriage ahead of them.

Destin groaned. “She’s obnoxious.” He nodded in apology at Erran. “Sorry. Since she’s your sister and all.”

Erran held up both hands. “Can’t be angry with a man speaking the truth.”

“She’s betrothed to Aliksander Law, Des,” Mariel said, though it vexed her to remind him. That she had knowledge or interest in the doings of the marriages of highborns was another slap in the face of her cause. Her deterioration.

“Why are you telling me, tell her!”

“Oh, I ken Mother is doing so herself right about now,” Erran said.

“I’m nay interested in her... her whatever.” Destin rolled his eyes and pointed his gaze out the window.

He is, Erran mouthed and Mariel laughed. Destin scowled at the passing hills.

She curled into Erran’s welcome arms and nuzzled against his chest. His fingers brushed soft lines down her arm as he opened the book Khallum had given him, a fiction about two travelers stranded in a forest. One of his lawmen had confiscated it off a thug beating another man in an alleyway, and he’d saved it for his best mate, since he enjoyed reading so much, usually when he was at sea for a spell with long hours to kill. That was something new she’d learned about Erran. It made her like him even more. It made him even more real, a man of his own nature and creation.

Counting his heartbeats calmed hers. It was something she used to do when she was a little girl, when her nightmares had been so frequent and consuming. Her mother would come in and lie beside her until she fell asleep again, to the steady rhythm of her pulse.

“Any good?” she asked when he was an hour into his reading. Across the carriage, Destin snored into his sleeve.

“Hm? Oh, aye. It is.” He kissed the top of her head. “It’s about two people from different kingdoms who end up in the same place by some coincidence and then are chased by madmen into this enchanted forest. They escape, but then realize they’re no longer in their own world at all. They have to work together to find their way home.”

“Do they?”

He held up the book, his thumb marked about a third of the way in. “I’ll let you know.”

Mariel sighed and settled back in. He readjusted his arm to pull her closer. “Another world, eh? Sounds like the legends about the Hinterlands and the Medvedev lands.”

“Legends are all they are.” Erran chuckled. “If we could travel to other worlds, we’d know.”

“Would we? Men are so secretive when they find something of value.”

He took a moment with that. “True.”

Mariel drew circles on his shirt with her finger. Once she said what she was about to say, it would be out there, and taking it back would be worse than having said it at all. But she’d been working the problem in the back of her thoughts for days, ever since their rescue. She had never halfway committed to anything, and her marriage could be no exception. She either wanted to be Erran’s wife or she didn’t. “When we get back, I’m going to tell my friends about us. And then, if they’re willing, I’d like them to meet you.”

Erran set the book down, marking his place with a scrap of leather. “I know it’s no small thing for you to suggest it. And I’d love to meet the people you love. But you don’t have to prove anything. If you say you care about me, that’s enough.”

“I do care about you, and this is why I want this. I can’t be two people anymore.”

“That I can understand. It’s your choice, and I will respect whatever you decide.” He paused. “I’ve been thinking a bit myself.”

“While reading?”

“I sometimes do this thing...” He got quiet. “It’s as though I can split my mind. Focusing on one thing lets me focus on another, and next thing I know, I’ve done both. I suppose it makes no sense to you.”

“Nay, but it’s interesting.” She grinned up at him.

He grinned back. “If I asked you to show me your work, would you?”

“Show you... what?” Mariel sat up on the bench.

He scooted so he was facing her sideways. “You told me about decimated villages... the families. I’d like to see this with my own eyes. Not because I don’t believe you, I do.”

“And what will you do with this experience?” she asked warily. His heart was rooted by good intentions, but the people wouldn’t appreciate being treated like curiosities.

Erran linked her hands in his. “It will give me time to wrap my own thoughts around the problem. I want to come to Father with a solution in my own words, with my own experience, in a way he’ll listen.”

Mariel almost didn’t know what to say. The only thing better than robbing the stewards blind would be to influence a better world, a better way. But that had always been only a dream, an unpassable valley. “Will he?”

“I don’t know,” he said, quieter. “But he’ll either listen or lose a son for his stubbornness. That should hurt more than any financial loss, but if I’m wrong, better to know, aye?”