II. All Those Who Wander
Spoilers for The Queen of Attolia.
Her new husband had slipped back to his own chambers, sparing their privacy the long reach of the attendants' prying gossip, leaving her to sleep alone. Yet here she lay awake, weirdly aware of his absence in her bed after only one night.
He was no half-grown boy, no simple goatfoot. She could say this even as she was fairly certain she was the first and only woman with whom he'd ever shared a bed, if his completely unvaunted propensity for blushing lightly at the sight of a woman in a nightdress was at all telling. Then again, perhaps it was only that he'd never bedded a beautiful woman; no one, not even her bitterest enemies, had ever denied her that prestige.
She thought of when the rumors had eagerly gabbed that he was Eddis' lover. She thought of when he had claimed of his own accord to have a sweetheart, and when she'd later realized his identity she had also pieced together that this phantom beloved was none other than that same rival queen. At the time, she had been slightly more inclined than not to believe the rumors, for the Queen of Eddis and her Thief had always been said to be close. Perhaps, though, they only appeared so in the center of the increasingly sparse circle of their less-liked cousins.
Irene doubted now that Eugenides could ever have loved Helen in that way, at least in the time that he'd claimed to. Eddis was all that Attolia was not: kind, blunt, dark, popular, trusted, ugly. Still, a few short months later, Eugenides had forsaken his lifelong right to call her My Queen in favor of crossing the chasms of his nightmares, kneeling at Attolia's feet and taking her hand and embracing her with all her loveless battle wounds. Wounds less obvious than his (her breath caught still at the remembrance of his begging and the thunk of the blade and the stink of cauterizing flesh), but no less real. She knew it was not only duty—Eddis would have hanged her Thief before letting his think for an instant that this union was what she wanted—nor was it simple empathy. She thought there was a touch of empathy in his love, that he understood her brokenness as she witnessed his; but it would take a superhuman man to act as Eugenides had in the wake of what she had done to him, and if it was not duty that moved him it could be nothing else but love.
Calf love doesn't usually survive amputation, Your Majesty.
No. It didn't.
She sighed, half-angry at the unruliness of her thoughts. Wedding nights, perhaps, were meant to foster unruly thoughts, but it had hardly been a conventional wedding night, and she was a far cry from any ordinary bride, even as a virgin one.
One hand twitched towards the side of the bed that lay empty, clasping vainly around the sheets that still held a bit of his warmth. She shut her eyes, recalling the smoothness of so much skin on skin, sweat and heady foreign scents, her tears, his tears, early shouted epithets (and a glass bauble full of ink, spilling its innards over the wallpaper) and later whispered endearments. It had all been, somehow, impressively straightforward, but no less…sweet. She'd hadn't been expecting sweet—and any overly maudlin rose-petal sentimentality had been tempered by their lachrymation—but it had been, all the same.
She thought of how he had settled against her when it was done, his weight against her side both gloriously comfortable and glaringly alien. So few ever touched her freely, and no one could be said to settle. Then again Eugenides was particularly well-known for flouting conventionality.
He had been every inch her king.
And she had, against all her expectations, been happy. Utterly happy: emotionally salubrious for perhaps the first time in her stone-masoned life.
They had only rested in the languid, sated aftermath for an hour more before he crept away, reluctant and reverent, with a last lingering kiss. She could still feel his lips against hers. Two hours at most had been the sum total of her wedding night, and yet the sensation of loneliness was already a set thing: in those two hours, something within her had been triggered and the bolt could not be redrawn.
Opening her eyes again, she fixed her gaze absently on the filigree around the rim of the ceiling and wondered if it had been as hard for her Thief to leave her as it was for her to be left.