Page 17 of The Ruin of Eros

Waiting.

“This…this marriage,then.” The very word seems unreal. “It would not be…physical?” My whole body seems to flush as I say it.

“Nothing will be forced upon you.”

“And what… tasks would you have me perform?” I can’t help thinking back to that word,obedience. It’s true, it’s in our vows back home; I would have had to swear as much to Yiannis. Only now do I realize how sinister such a vow can be.

“Very few,” he says dryly. “I do not seek a servant.”

“So what, then, would you have me obey?”

“The rules of my home,” he says, impatience clipping the edges of his words now. “Designed to protect us both.”

No: I must be mad. The very thought of it—yoking myself to this stranger who comes from the darkness…

“Even if I were to accept,” I say boldly, “there could be no true marriage. There is no temple here, there would be none of the holy rituals.” In our land, marriage requires many things. Without these things no union can be sealed; nothing would hold either in the eyes of the gods or of the people.

He waves a hand. “We have no need of those things. Do you know so little of the Old Laws?”

I don’t know why, but at those words another shiver passes through me.

“I have never heard of the Old Laws.”

“So much is forgotten,” he says, as if to himself. Then he turns back to me. “There are laws which are older even than the gods, Psyche. Laws which even the gods themselves must yield to. All we need do,” he says, “is bind your words.”

My words.I look back down at the sea, at its churning green. The tentacled thing is submerged again, but I’m not fool enough to believe it has gone. As for the man who stands in front of me…no honest man need hide his face. My words, it seems to me, are the only thing I have left.

But what choice do I have?

“Very well,” I say. “Bind them.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He steps toward me…and then away. He’s walking to the path that led me here, toward the scrub and vegetation that grow scantily on this forsaken spot, a little ways from the cliff edge. When he comes back to stand before me, he’s closer than he was before. He’s taller than I had realized. There is a scent of him: of incense, of the woods at night. And there’s something in his hand—a peach. One of those shriveled, wild peaches that grow here by the rocks, stunted and dry.

Involuntarily I take a step back.

He holds out the fruit to me, a shriveled, salty thing. His hand is the first part of him I have seen uncovered. It consoles me a little to see that there is nothing fearful in it. On the contrary: it is bronze in color, large and strong, not monstrous.

“Take it,” he says. “Eat it.”

I stare at the withered little fruit in the center of his palm.

“Your time is almost over. I will not wait for you, once the beast comes.” He plucks the peach from his palm and holds it up for me to see.

“Under the Old Laws, I must make you a gift of food. In offering it, I bind myself to you. In accepting it, you bind yourself to me.”

He drops it into my palm and from sheer instinct my hand tightens around it. It’s warm from his hand.

Could it be poisoned? Or perhaps one bite will trick me into something worse—will fasten me to some more dreadful fate than any I have yet imagined.

“Isn’t there some other way?”

He folds his arms, not deigning to answer. The rock beneath me shakes as something—something I dare not imagine—smacks the side of the cliff with its mighty limb. My hands shake; the peach slips. I fumble and catch it before it hits the ground,and down in the water I see another flick of a scaled, greyish tentacle.

I raise the peach to my lips, thinking of all the reasons I should not bite into it. One above all stands out.No honest man hides his face.

I bite the peach.

*

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