CHAPTER 6

Khosa

The weight of her husband’s body hitting the other side of the bed startles Khosa awake, and sends her hands gripping the covers and pulling them to her chin.

“Hush, it’s only me,” Vincent says, his breath thick with wine, no doubt the reason why he sprawled so casually on their shared bed. Sometimes in his sleep he moves as if he were still alone, and more than once he’s called out Milda’s name. Though the baker’s daughter has long since been sent from his side and she herself is unwilling to fill the absent girl’s duties, it rankles. In sleep, her husband’s body acts as if she were not there, and his dreams are filled with another.

“Vincent?” She reaches for him carefully, every evening attempting to see how much contact she can bear. Tonight she manages to stroke his face, a quick swipe of the jawline before the sound of her skin brushing his sends clam chowder, burning with bile, back into her mouth.

He takes her fingers in his and presses them against her own pillow, giving her palm a chaste squeeze.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he says. “I had a drink too many with Donil.”

“Or a bottle too many,” she chides, aware of how slow his voice is, his movements clumsy.

“It’s rather difficult being married to a woman so adept at reading others,” he says, but his laugh is bitter rather than amused. She coils into herself further, managing a quiet “good night” and a halfhearted stroke of his hair before closing her eyes.

Yet she cannot sleep with such a heavy silence between them. It presses down upon her, a new disappointment she has brought to Stille after failing her Keepers in Hyllen so often. She is so aware of Vincent, even in the darkness, that she knows he does not sleep and that they both stare at the same spot of nothingness. And though he may tease her about the difficulties of being married to her, they are quite real.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is a wine-soaked exhalation so quiet she is at first unsure which one of them spoke it.

“What have you to be sorry for?” she asks, moving her hand closer to him under the covers, enough for her to feel the heat radiating from his body.

“To come to bed drunk, to wake you from sleep with the crash of a body next to yours. You might have thought . . .” He lets his sentence fade out, not wanting to recall spilled milk and blood, the mildew stench of the dairy, and Cathon the Scribe’s teeth scattered on the stone floor.

“He is long rotting,” Khosa says, though she suppresses a shudder. “And Merryl guards our door. He’d let no one in who would do me harm.”

“Some nights I doubt he’ll let me in,” Vincent says.

“I would never give such an order,” Khosa says, a bit too sharply.

“I know that,” her husband says, but they are quiet again, and she fears they both think the same thing: Only because you don’t have to. No, all it takes to dissuade Vincent from touching her is his respect, her reluctance a wall between them.

She wishes she could reach for him and do what most wives find pleasurable, or bearable at the least. Every night she tries to take the wall down, stone by stone, one more breath of touch, a moment more of shared heat.

Khosa tries again, in the dark. With her eyes closed and her mind on another, she presses her palm against Vincent’s bare back, her hand soft against the muscles between his shoulder blades, which flicker under her touch. They lie together silently, tense as Tangata about to pounce, each of them silently counting the other’s pulse beats. She pulls away at last and wipes her hand discreetly.

Vincent rolls to face her, and her heart dips, the soft sheets around her suddenly as rough as Cathon’s robes had been. Rotting or not, the Scribe still haunts her. But her husband is not that man.

“What did you think of Sallin’s proposal?”

Khosa’s heart slows, and she settles more deeply into the cocoon of the bed, pleased that her husband shares the running of the kingdom with her, even if its citizens so recently would have seen her drowned.

“Honestly?”

“Always.”

“It is not unwise.”

“A hearty endorsement,” Vincent teases, and she hits him with a pillow.

“Truth now,” he says, after tossing it back. “What are your thoughts?”

Khosa bites her lip in the darkness, searching for words. She wants to answer Vincent honestly, but must do so with care. The closeness of their bed this night may not be what her husband wishes for, but is more than they’ve shared in recent memory, their friendship weakening under the requirements of matrimony.

“You know that I still dance?” she asks quietly, her feet twitching even at the words.

“Yes, of course,” he says. “Though I had hoped it might fade, in time.”

“It may,” Khosa agrees, but one ankle gives a sharp jerk in disagreement. Only she, the king, and Merryl know that the bars on their chamber window are not to ward off attackers, but to keep the Redeemed from the sea when her body demands it.

“You do not think it will?”

Khosa sighs, her fear sailing to the arched ceiling above them. Only another Given could understand the pull she feels—or, she thinks darkly, one of the unfortunate sea creatures captured in a trapman’s net, dragged to the shore to drown in air.

“Is it . . .” Her husband’s voice is hesitant again, another stone returned to the wall between them. “Is it like desire, then?”

“Somewhat,” she says, rolling onto her own side to face him. “Like being near the one you want, but keeping yourself from them because you must.”

“I can certainly understand that,” Vincent says, his voice stiff and formal as when he addresses people in the great hall. “You speak as though you know how it feels to deny yourself.”

“Yes,” Khosa says slowly, dropping her eyes.

“You still feel for Donil?” he questions his wife.

“Yes,” Khosa answers, raising her gaze to his without shame, for she harbors none.

Vincent sighs, closing his eyes against her. “Very well. Continue,” he says.

“It is like that,” she goes on. “I do not believe that I am Given to the Sea. It is life that calls me. I feel it for Donil, and I felt it too for Dara, in that moment when she led me to the water. She’d pulled life from a tree only moments before, killing it with her magic and bringing it into herself.”

The silence from his side of the bed is heavy with anger now, toward her or Dara she doesn’t know, but she plows on, the damaging words already out.

“Whatever is inside of me, husband, it’s calling for life. Perhaps I go not to the sea but to something beyond, to land not yet inked on maps. Our world is dying. Ank the Feneen said as much. Birds do not build nests, the Tangata do not make kits, the Indiri themselves are of the very earth and do not thrive. Where we stand fails. Why fight for soil that reeks of salt? Why not do as Sallin says and strike out for new earth?”

In her passion, she’s clutched onto him, her hand linked in his, their knucklebones digging into one another. She attributes his silence to this, his bated breath held by her reckless words.

Until it is released in a long, wine-soaked snore.