Chapter Ten
Sconces lighted as Sofia walked into Cedric's spartan room and shut the door. The room was round, the furniture specially shaped to fit flush against the walls. A bulky monster of a four-poster bed occupied most of the space. There was one large window with heavy, dark, velvet drapes that were tied shut. The window was framed by a wardrobe and a desk. There were a few piles on the desk: a stack of letters, a few books, a bottle of ink with a quill beside it, and a journal opened to the most recent entry.
Sofia paced around the room a few times before she stripped her dress off; the slapping of the blood-wetted silk against her legs was an unpleasant reminder of recent events. Her dress finally in a irrevocably stained lavender pile on the floor, Sofia found herself in just her shift and sitting at the desk. The pile of letters were yellowed with age and all in her hand. They were the letters she had written him over the years, before she gave up when he stopped responding. The envelopes showed signs of being opened again and again; the corners were worn, the ink smudged here and there. The letters were important to him. It was bittersweet to see, considering how she had burned each of his old letters to her after the replies had stopped coming, after she had come to believe he didn't love her anymore.
Her eyes danced over to the open journal. She saw her name appear several times across the page before she jumped back from the journal as if the pages might reach out and bite her. She shouldn't snoop. She should just change and sit on the bed and try and figure out what to do next. She wanted to see James. She wanted to see her Aunt Tilly. She shivered and crossed her arms. She wanted to be standing around in more than just her shift at the top of a drafty tower. Sofia walked over to the wardrobe and pulled the double doors open.
The offerings were sparse and decidedly masculine. She ended up settling on a well worn pair of black-almost-gray trousers that she was able to pull tight enough for them not to slide down her waist. They were impossibly long, however, requiring her to roll them up over her ankles several times. She also took one of his cream colored shirts and slipped it over her head. The fabric was cool against her skin. But she immediately felt as though Cedric's warm arms were embracing her. The scent of him on the shirt was almost overwhelming. The scent reminded her of earth, of painfully short days spent outside in the sun, of hiding together and stealing kisses when no one would see.
Those days felt like a dream. Sofia had been safe and loved and happy. And then she had been used as an olive branch to subdue an enemy. With barely a week of warning, she had been transplanted into a new culture with a rigid new family and a foreign husband. She had tried, oh she had tried to even just befriend him. But he hadn't been receptive to her attempts. It wasn't how things were done, the maids told her reluctantly. A wife's place, a Queen's place, was silently beside her King. An object to be admired. A tool to continue the royal line. And certainly not someone to be loved. A Monarch's love was reserved for their people. Sofia had tried that, throwing herself into the philanthropies her position allowed her to interact with. It wasn't enough. It barely touched the love she had felt with Cedric, the love she desperately wanted to feel from her husband as he turned her over in the dark of night and slid into her unceremoniously, finishing with a grunt before leaving her alone in their bed. She had learned not to try for kisses, for touches, for affection. There was no love there to be found, only duty.
And so, starved for connection, for love, for anything, Sofia found herself willing to overlook all of Cedric's misdeeds in the desperate hope that he might be bothered to hold her again.
Cedric was right. He had acted with good intentions. Her husband was a possessive, paranoid man. And Sofia was a poor liar. He would have discovered any plan for her to violate the marriage contract, a document Sofia had not been allowed to read. Her reading it hadn't been deemed necessary by her husband. But to curse her, and to sleep with Amber to do it...Sofia knew that magic sometimes required the generation of a huge amount of energy. That's where the association of ritual sacrifice and magic came from. Sex could generate the same kind of energy, if a less permanent kind. Beyond the curse, the idea of Cedric sleeping with Amber - it awoke a jealousy in Sofia that she was uncomfortable with. Amber had never married and kept Cedric close to her side. It didn't seem farfetched to imagine them being intimate again.
Curious, nervous, and unwilling to be lied to, Sofia decided to find the answers for herself. She found herself sliding into the desk chair again. She opened the journal, searching for the few days that preceded her wedding. She scanned lines until she found the curse written out and the steps it would require. She marked the date and flipped forward until she found the same date a year forward. The entry read:
Sofia,
Two of eight.
My soul is blackened again today.
I love you
They all began and ended the same way, no matter the entry. They were all addressed to her. It was a manifesto of confession; an entire book filled with his every dark choice and declarations of love, often accompanied by apologies, after each entry.
It made Sofia feel ill. She pushed back from the desk and stood up, pacing around the room again. It made her feel ill to know Cedric had slept with Amber again and again to keep the curse viable. It made her ill to know he kept dutiful records of the terrible things he had done, likely reading over them again and again as some sort of twisted recompense. It made her ill to be filled with sympathy and compassion in knowing concretely that he wasn't guiltless.
It made Sofia feel ill to know, deep in her soul, that she loved him even more for it.
.
.
A/N: I feel like we needed a chapter to show some Sofia introspection, to understand how it could be possible for Cedric and Sofia to move forward together, if they do. I tried to make it clear that Sofia isn't ignoring his actions just because she's too dewy-eyed-in-love. The conditions of her life have scarred her, marred her innocence and she's desperate for what circumstance has denied her, to the point that she may be willing to adjust her world view. I hope that came through.