The love of my life is fierce, and she is bleeding, and that’s my fault as much as it is Orholam’s and Orea’s and Ulbear’s.
“Fee,” I say gently. “Let there be no darkness between us. Having decided the bed was the only battlefield by which I could seize our prize, you’re damn right I didn’t tiptoe over those marriage oaths you released me from. Doing that could have meant I did it all for nothing. Do you want to hear how I alternated between mumming the masterful, attentive lover such as she’ll never know again in her life and the guilt-wrenched husband who needed to go back to his wife and children, just so that she was ever desperate for me and ever fearful to lose me? Do you want to know every step by which I isolated her from her family and friends so that when it came time to betray them and her duties, she was happy to do it, if only it meant I would stay for another few weeks? And how when she gave me the scrolls, I left that very night, with no explanation at all, doubtless destroying her—because my heart ached for you? You think that one awkward, arrhythmic virgin could displace you? You think she could be your equal in the bedchamber or—”
“She’s half my age, and hasn’t borne three children, and as you said, I’ve not been—”
“Do you think I’m a man who could fall in love with a woman I don’t respect?” I snap.
“A man will believe almost anything if one properly addresses what’s below his waist.”
“You think in four weeks—”
“The brief time makes it worse, Andross! I don’t fear that I’m not the equal of that poor girl; I fear I’m not the equal of your imagination. A man can’t fall in love at first sight with a woman; he falls in love with what he imagines she is. She is the canvas onto which he casts his hopes and dreams. And if the reports are right, this girl was a particularly lissome and nubile canvas indeed.”
“What am I, seventeen?!”
“Why, because men old enough to know better have never traded their aging wives for younger, stupider ones?!”
“You know me too well for this. This is madness dressed up as fear. I’ve proven my troth a thousand times. You know about all the women who have tried to seduce me since we married. You know about the old lovers who’ve tried to ignite my interest again since I became the Red. I hold you in my eyes, Firuzeh Eszter Laleh Dariush. My Felia, my Felia Guile, how could I trade you? What kind of magic cunt would a woman have to have to even tempt me for an instant? From you? You! A woman who could be empress, should she will it? You think I would trade that girl’s gullibility, her weakness, for your strength?”
But I still see fear in her eyes.
“If you believe that,” I say, “you haven’t lost me, you’ve lost yourself.”
She searches my eyes, for any falseness, I suppose. If I could play so many others so skillfully, so cruelly, could I not play her, too? I try to open my gaze to her, as we did when we were young, but I can only see red.
After only a moment, I can see her gaze turn inward. “I don’t feel strong. Not anymore.”
“You’re strong enough.”
“I don’t think so,” she says.
I point and raise my voice. “Door’s that way.”
It’s a slap in her face. She literally gasps. “Would you let me go? Easy as that? After all we’ve been through? All we’ve done?”
“Letting you leave me would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But this is war, no matter that only you and I see it now. If you’re going to turn coward, I need to know before I trust you with my future and the world’s.”
“I’m not strong enough—”
“Strength is a choice. Courage is a habit. Unfortunately, cowardice is, too.”
She looks me in the eye for the longest time. “We haven’t made love since you got back.”
I raise my hands, palms up. Whose choice was that?
But then I understand. Even this many years into our marriage, this new circumstance requires new responses: knowing her wounded, I’ve made overtures only. Hurting, reactive, she’d needed determined pursuit instead, while I had been certain that determined pursuit would get me an explosion of anger.
It would’ve. I see that now.
But perhaps we’d needed that to lance this boil. I hadn’t needed the fight, hadn’t wanted the mess and fallout of a huge argument, so I thought we didn’t need it. An error.
She lets it go. Looks down. Turns back to the table.
She says, “The worst of it is that I’ve seen copies of this scroll before. So at first I thought it was all for . . . nothing.”
As she finishes the sentence, I walk up behind her. I breathe in her hair, looming over her, hands bracing on the table to either side of her, but I don’t touch her.
She puts her hand on my sleeve to push open the cage of my arms, but I hold, and she doesn’t push hard.
“I need your everything, Fee,” I tell her. “Without you, I am utterly alone in this world. A candle on a rampart with a storm coming. An ox dragged from the path by the weight of the empty yoke where his partner belongs. I can’t do the work set before us without you, heart of my heart. I need your wisdom. I need your kindness. Your perspicacity. Your hand on the oar. I need that strength in you that you’ve always underestimated. Your hidden ferocity.” I kiss her neck softly and am rewarded with a wave of gooseflesh. “You are my compass, my windlass, and my following wind. I need you like a singer needs a voice, like a tune needs a tempo, the chorus its pitch. I need you like a spearman needs his shield, the charger his harness, like the archer his bow. I need you like the crops need the sun, the dyer her colors, a drafter the light. I need you as the stars need the night. I need you as a poet needs words . . .”
Still she says nothing.
“And I want you. I want you like that night out in the vineyard at Stony Brook. I want you like that very unstealthy Sun Day Eve in our tent right next to your parents’. I want you like that morning atop the red tower with the luxiats banging on the door, wondering how it had been locked from outside.” My voice lowers below a whisper of warm breath in her ear. “God, how I want you . . .”
The moment stretches, a privation and a punishment as I breathe the sweet scent of her. I long to grab her and take her, to make the decision for her that I can tell she doesn’t want to make. But I don’t.
Never has our union been of a weaker partner bowing ever to the whims of the greater. Nor can it be. In all the world, she is the one flower I will not crush beneath the wheels of the great siege engine that is my will.
She doesn’t move.
The moment stretches beyond bearing.
I won’t wait forever. I won’t see my need turned to weakness, my hunger turned to starvation. I pull back.
But she snares my sleeve, and as a rider controls all the raging mass of a charging warhorse with a few narrow strips of leather, I am stopped.
Is this a partnership after all?
Sometimes I wonder if she is not far the greater of us.
She doesn’t make me wait long enough to pursue the thought. She wants to know she has my full attention. She tilts her neck a little, to let her hair fall clear of the spot I kissed before.
I know she needs this. I know she wants to punish me a little. I know she needs to feel my pursuit, but it irks me, too, to be bidden like a dog. I am Andross Guile.