You Wear Corruption With A Vague And Childish Air

The first time, she wore heartbreak like a veil.

The doors to his room crashed open. Kheo looked up from the desk, armed with a blistering reprimand for whoever dared invade his privacy and a twist of power to ram the point home: no one came into his rooms unannounced.

And then he saw who it was, and his heart was jolted with cold anticipation. For a moment, he thought she had come to him as he’d always hoped: she’d left that sham of a marriage to be his queen. “Ryar? What are you-”

“He’s gone,” she cried, and her voice cracked like thunder in the room. Her eyes were wild and glazed with tears, her face pale and utterly distraught. She was all frenzied motion, stabbing her hands into that shining, moonstruck hair to pull at it in what seemed a bitter mockery of his won gestures, long ago. “He said he would, but I didn’t think – I didn’t believe...”

“Who?” he said, baffled.

“Fireblade,” she whispered, and suddenly her anguish became clear. “He’s with another woman.”

As if all her bones had become broken glass, she crumpled to her knees, back bowed and shuddering, and her sobs wracked the air.

He didn’t know what to do. Part of him – cold, considering – thought that the only surprise was that it had taken so long to happen. Fireblade had played the dutiful husband for three months, but anyone could see the way his eyes roved over the court beauties, flagrant in his admiration.

Why did you marry her? You don’t love her. You never did. At best, you loved the way she worshipped you, but no one who loved her would treat as you have. With such contempt, with such thoughtless cruelty.

Only bitterness had kept Kheo from interfering. Ryar had turned him down, she had made her burning bed with Fireblade, and he had meant to see her lie in it and rue the day she refused him.

And yet...and yet he could not leave her there, broken, gripped by despair. He had thought he would feel smug, justified when Fireblade betrayed as he inevitably would. Vindicated, he would snub her as she had snubbed him, leaving her to loneliness and regret.

But now that the day was here, now that he was proved once more the better man...

Still I love you. And I can’t leave you to this.

He knelt down beside her, pushing back her hair, gently prying away her hands until she stared at him, red-eyed, ugly in her grief, her skin splotched with heat and teartracks.

“Leave him,” he said flatly. “This is only the first time, Ryar, and it will not be the last.”

Her mouth trembled – and hardened. “No,” she said, her voice husky but fierce. “I won’t give up.”

“Do you think he cares about you?” he demanded. “Do you think his vows mean a thing to him?”

“They mean something to me,” she answered, and she had a sad dignity as she drew back from him, gathering herself. Dusting away the tears, she held up her head and looked him full in the face, and mingled with the raw pain in her eyes there was a kind of defiance. “And I will not make my promise worthless.”

Wounded by her rejection, he stood, turning his back on her. He couldn’t bear to look at her, or he feared he might give voice to the frustration and the desperation he felt. This cruel charade would continue: how much longer must he watch her fling herself at Fireblade, breaking on his implacable indifference as waves shattered on the rocks.

“You don’t need to,” he said, unable to keep silent. “He’ll do that for you.”

Her footsteps echoed in his mind long after she had fled.

~*~

The next time, it was fury that crowned her.

She came in on the wave of a storm, or what felt very much like one. A vast, lashing wall of water tore his doors clean off the hinges, and knocked him clean off his feet, stinging his legs and arms like a horde of wasps.

“How dare he?” she snarled as he staggered to his feet. Kheo had never seen such a ferocious light in her eyes. It transformed her into something alien, her softness replaced by this tense, unsettling water witch around whom waterdrops danced and darted as if gravity could not outweigh her rage. “With that whore!”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word,” he commented, keeping his voice light and unconcerned while his mind raced. “Which of the court’s many, many women of easy virtue are you talking about?”

Her mouth curled, and to his alarm, mist rolled from her skin. This was a new facet of her power. “Avarice. My dear, devoted sister.”

“Ah. And you’re surprised?” He sat on the edge of the bed like he hadn’t a care in the world. “You know why he did it, of course.”

Some of the violence in her expression faded, replaced by puzzlement. No, obviously she hadn’t given any thought to the matter: only reflexive, virulent rage.

“Punishment, I imagine,” he continued, as if musing aloud. “He was so very displeased when you spoke up for that prisoner. Mercy is not his foremost quality, after all, and what better way to take revenge? Avy fawns after him, no matter how hard she tries to hide it by seducing every man in the kingdom, and when he throws her away again – and he will, mark my words – he’ll have left two broken hearts in his wake.” He raised his eyebrows. “And you’ll have learned not to defy him.”

It was pure steam billowing from her body now, making her body ripple and blur like a fading dream, and her voice was hard. “Oh, will I?”

“Supposedly.” He eyed her, and said blandly, “I have my doubts, though.”

Suddenly, water splashed to the ground, leaving her bare before him, once more the girl he knew. “You’re the only one.”

He shrugged. That was true.

“I know what they whisper about me, Kheo. They’ve always thought me weak, and now they think me spineless. I’m just his puppet wife, speaking the words he puts in my mouth.” A thin, sad smile curved her mouth. “I saw their faces when I spoke up for that poor boy. Shocked, the lot of them!”

He smiled, despite himself. “Fools, the lot of them.”

“And you let him live.” She studied him, head tiled to one side. He loved that look: sweet, quizzical, seeing those pieces of him that no one else even thought to look for. “Why?”

Kheo thought about lying, but she would know. Few people could lie to Ryar: she had an uncanny ability to pluck untruth from words, save those lies she wanted to believe. “To please you.”

Her lips parted, pink, petal-soft – no longer his to kiss. “Kheo...”

He hated himself for saying it, for begging. “I still love you. That hasn’t changed. Leave him, Ryar. How many more times does he have to break your heart?”

She turned her face aside as if the words had been a blow. “And what would I do then, Kheo? Marry you?”

“Yes!” He stood, reaching for her hand. It was cool and clammy in his, and despite herself, her fingers curled around his. “Would that be so terrible?”

“It would be madness.” She was trembling, skittish, and he wanted to wrap her up in his arms and soothe away her shivers, but knew it would send her into flight. “Do you think Fireblade would stand for it? He’s so proud, Kheo, and to lose me to you...”

“I don’t care,” he said firmly. “Let him rage.”

She did open her eyes then, and they were dreamy, staring into the future. “It would be more than rage. He would turn half the court against you, the ones who resent you, the ones who hunger to see you humbled and crushed. It would be civil war, and it would leave nothing of this world but ashes and bloodstains. I would die, and you...” Tenderness crept into her eyes, and she raised her hand to brush her knuckles against his cheek as if that impersonal contact was all she would permit herself. “You would become monstrous. And in all the world, you would be the only living thing left, alone and mad forever.”

His mouth was dry as a desert. “You could just have said no.”

A half-smile. “You wouldn’t have been satisfied with that.”

“And so I must be satisfied with this?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and stepped back, withdrawing in to herself. “It’s not much of a future, but it’s better than the alternative.”

“You can’t live your life by what might happen,” he retorted. It was an old argument, revived again by the necromancy of his need. “You live in the future, Ryar, and you’re so afraid of what might go wrong that you’re blind to everything that might go right.”

She didn’t speak for a long time, and he thought that perhaps he had silenced her. But when she did speak, her eyes were full of age, of countless time that had rolled past her eyes. “I used to spend hours reading the future. I told myself it was preparation, that I was doing it for the people, for the country, for noble reasons. I wasn’t. I was looking for you and me. I was trying to see our future, to find what might go right. But there was nothing. I could find no future where you and I lived happily ever after: only wars and death and endless atrocities.”

Wordless, it was he who could find no answer.

“And you know what?” she continued lightly, conversationally. “I couldn’t find one single future with me in it. So don’t talk to me about what might go right, Kheo. Because if that’s what really matters to you, then you should strike me down where I stand. Either I die, or countless thousands do.”

She left while he was reeling, only her damp footprints left to show that she had been there.

And long after she was out of earshot, when he lay on his bed in sleepless fretting, his answer slipped form his lips like a promise of days to come.

“Then let them die.”

~*~

The third time, she wore fear like a second skin.

Later, Kheo would realise how brave she must have been. How she must have crawled once she was capable of it, then walked as her bones healed after the savage beating Fireblade have given her, desperately trying to outrun the rumours that would follow. Later, he found traces of her blood in the little-used passages she had taken, enough to imagine her reeling steps, her gasps of breath, her ceaseless path to him.

She had known that he would want vengeance, and known too that he would not be content otherwise: that war and death would be nothing to him, started for love, inevitably ending in tragedy.

Understanding him as she did, bared beneath her eyes and those heady days of youth when she’d explored everything about him with her inquisitive questions and gentle touch, she had seen the one solution that would satisfy them both.

And perhaps, just that once, she had decided to make her own future.

She stumbled in, sliding between the doors like a ghost, and she must have been there for several seconds before he noticed her.

“Isn’t it a little late to come visiting?” he said, putting aside the letter that he still had not finished. He stood, unsure why she’d come.

She shut the door, back pressed to it. There was a feverish glitter to her eyes, a faint echo of the wildness he had seen in her rage. Tonight though, she was neither violent nor broken but something that held more of desire in her flush and the way her chest rose and fell.

“Not for what I have in mind.”

He was certain for a moment that it must be a trick. To believe it would to be to face rejection again, to be reduced to an observer of her life. “Ryar...?”

Over she walked, moving like the girl he had once known, as if she danced on the air itself, the long sweep of her hair an earthly echo of the Milky Way that scorched the night sky. Something of the moon in her rolling hips, in the crescent of her hesitant smile.

“He’s gone again,” she said, defiant. “And so have I. Maybe I can’t have the happy ending, but there’s more to life than endings, isn’t there?”

Still he was wary, holding himself back. So it was she who had to be confident, she who stepped into his body, hands wreathing his neck, her touch as light and familiar as he recalled. And it seemed only natural to slide his arms around her, to feel her shift into his embrace so she fitted against him as she had long ago in a chase through the market, a night of adrenaline and laughter and then, in the breathless pause before she’d said farewell, he’d swept her up and lowered his mouth to hers, like this.

And her lips had been so soft, and still were, she’d felt half a dream in his arms, something that might collapse into mist if he held her too tight. Oh, he was always so careful with Ryar, gentle in a way that he didn’t know how to be with anyone else. And this was what he’d wanted: eager kisses, time to make up, all the aches of the intervening years soothed away by the knowledge that she’d come back to him.

They weren’t a king and a sorceress, just two people who’d half-forgotten what it felt like to hold someone you loved and know they felt the same.

And then it was a surreal, slow dance of hands and lips, her face above him, below him, beside him, her forehead pressed to his shoulder, half-laughing, half-gasping; it was skin and sweat and the feel of her teeth on his lip, it was her hair tangled in his hands, knotted and swirling as she moved with tidal rhythm, it was her tilting up his face so she could look into his eyes with an intimacy that was still astounding and just a little frightening.

It was a beginning.

~*~

When she woke, it was him she wore like a second skin. He was lost to her, bewitched by her return, and as she pulled on her clothes, there was haste to her movements that had not been there before.

“He’s back,” she mumbled when she saw him blink, woken by the space her body had filled. “He’s coming here.”

She was pale, frenzied, reduced back down to the timid woman he’d rued all these years, as if the mere act of rebellion had drained whatever strength she had found last night.

“And you’re going to run away?” he said, hurt making him scornful. So he was just her guilty secret once more: no matter that he was no longer an ordinary boy and she a princess, no matter that he fought to rise so high for hope of her, crowned or uncrowned, she was ashamed of him. Or that was how it felt.

“What else can I do?” she demanded. “I’ve told you what will happen if he knows.”

“So that’s it? Off you run, back to Fireblade so he can wring a few more tears from you next time he takes up with whatever pretty face catches his eye. And am I supposed to stand by and offer you lies and comfort?”

“No.” She faltered, perhaps shaken by the anger he felt freezing his face into a regal mask – but then she flew back to him, leaning over to entangle him in a brief, heated kiss. “You’re supposed to love me as he can’t,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and fierce. “And every moment he thinks I am his, I’ll be yours, and just think, Kheo, he won’t even know that you have conquered him in a way that no one else could. It’s a different sort of battle, one he doesn’t know how to win. Now smile, and think up a good excuse.”

She whirled, and was sat at the desk while he gawped – and when the doors flew open and Fireblade sauntered in like a hungry lion, he understood her words.

“-sorry, what was that last sentence?” Ryar said politely, quill poised above the parchment, her face neutral.

That orange gaze moved from one to the other as Kheo yawned and stretched. “Pay attention, darling. ‘And in return for our grace and favour, we hereafter expect that all rebellions in the Eastern Lands will be dealt with promptly and thoroughly, or we may find cause to make the Court of Brilliance a little less so.’ Good morning, Fireblade. Did you ever hear of knocking?”

He felt the power clawing at the air before Fireblade controlled himself. “Is there a reason my wife is in your bedroom while you’re half-naked?”

“Wholly naked, actually,” Kheo corrected lazily. “I find my instructions have a little more effect when your wife writes them. Probably because they can actually read her writing, unlike yours.”

“I find a sword a far more efficient message,” growled Fireblade, looking as if he had an urge to deliver a particularly pointed message to Kheo. “I won’t have you flaunting yourself in front of my wife. She isn’t yours anymore.”

Wrong, you idiot. A thousand times wrong.

“As you say,” he murmured. “Very well, Fireblade, next time I have an urgent dispatch for those slippery devils in the Eastern Lands, next time a rebellion nearly overthrows my council, I’ll be sure to stop and throw on some clothes before I deal with it-“

“What?” snapped Fireblade. “You didn’t mention this.”

“I was getting to it. As it happens, it’s fortunate that you’re here. I shall be sending a few soldiers to the Court of Brilliance to make sure they understand just how to keep the peace, and I thought you might want to recommend someone to hammer the lesson home.”

“I will go,” said the Drax through gritted teeth. “I am the King’s Champion, after all. I’ll make sure those sand-scuttlers understand their duty.”

“If you feel it necessary-” began Kheo.

“I do.”

“Then you may take my letter, and your lovely wife can continue to decorate my court. Bring me back something from the deserts,” he added, waving a hand. “Something...exotic, if you take my meaning.”

With the prospect of a fight ahead and a chance to taste the desert lands’ beautiful woman, Fireblade’s good humour was restored, his suspicions forgotten. “I’m sure I can find something to your taste.”

After he was gone, snatching the letter from Ryar’s hands, Kheo glanced at her and said quietly, “I think he already has, you know.”

She smiled.