Page 52 of The Ruin of Eros

“I know I cannot, butwhycan I not?”

He is quiet for a while. When he speaks, it’s not an answer to my question.

“Does it matter so very much?” His hands lie on the table in front of him, each knuckle smooth and well-defined in the candlelight.

“The eyes,” he says quietly, “are only one-fifth of the mortal senses.”

Why must you cling to this one thing?he means. I look toward my plate.

“But it’s not that Icannotsee you,” I say. “It’s that Imaynot. There is a difference.”

“Yes,” he says at last, and there’s a sigh in his voice. “There is.”

If I had been born blind, I wonder suddenly, would I, could I, feel like a true wife to him?

Senseless thought. I am a wife in nothing but name.Wifeis what I might have been to any human man. But this…this is just a bizarre and temporary alliance.

Temporary. That is key.

That is the part I must not forget.

“I am sorry, Psyche.” He touches my arm, only a brief touch, but I jerk back as though from a hot spark. It was not painful—quite the contrary—but the warmth of it lingers, just above my elbow. A glow, as if I had been standing in the sun.

He clears his throat.

“I—I am tired,” I say. “I will take my leave now.”

He says nothing as I push back my chair. The cool air of my bedroom is a relief against my hot cheeks. I go to the window and stare out at the unmoving sea.

I can surely diagnose what is wrong with me. I have been torn away from those I love; from everything I know. After so much loss so fast, I am not myself. The madness will surely pass. It is some symptom of my unfortunate situation, that I should be developing this…this grotesque preoccupation, I must call it, with the creature who brought me here. I suppose any wind-tossed, dizzy sparrow might cling to a wildcat’s back in a storm.

But I am no sparrow. I am a woman, with a woman’s courage, and a woman’s sense. And however wind-tossed my mind, I know what I may and may not cling to.

I wish I could go home, just for a moment.The pang comes over me as I stand here. The thought of sitting, just for a moment, in our courtyard again, hearing the soft splash of a fish in its shallow pond…of walking the road to the agora, with all its familiar sights, the trees and houses and stalls and merchants…

I wish I could see it all, just for a moment. It would be such a comfort.

And as I stare out the illusion-window, the thought comes to me.Think of it as a mural, he said. He told me I could conjure other images if I wished. What if that means real places, as well as imagined ones? When I sawhimconjuring that tremendous citadel, before, didn’t he as much as admit it?

I stand in front of the window and clear my throat.

“Show me Sikyon,” I say aloud. Nothing happens. I take a breath, and place my fingers against the gypsum. My heart seems to constrict for a moment.

Sikyon, I think, closing my eyes.Show me Sikyon. Please.

And when I open my eyes, the seascape has disappeared into darkness. Slowly, haltingly, a new image floods in.

And when it does, a wave of horror floods me.

Chapter Twenty

This can’t be real.

What I’m seeing isn’t the town I know. It’s a town destroyed. Buried alive. As though there was some sort of avalanche, as though the mountain itself gave way.

It can’t be real.The enchantments on this place have a life of their own; they’re playing some cruel joke. I push the back of my hand against my mouth to stop the bile from surging upward.

I fling open the bedroom door, feeling only the pounding through my body, seeing only darkness. He’s not here. The room is empty. I hurtle through it, into the corridors.

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