Page 124 of The Tsarina's Favorite
I lost all pretense of patience.I struggled to find my way out of the sick bed on the opposite side of where Alaina sat by me.I stumbled when I rose, my left leg stiff and subject to stabbing pains that radiated through my foot.I tore at the bandages that covered my face and freed myself from them.
As Alaina had told me, the few candles still lit around the room offered little light.It was a sumptuous room, decorated and outfitted like any well-appointed bedroom at court.I wanted to see if perhaps she had given me her room while I convalesced, but I refused to turn around, certain now that my face was unbandaged, I would offer her nothing but a hideous disfigurement that was all too humanly repulsive.
“You’re still unwell,” she scolded.
It didn’t matter.I needed to know, and I needed to know now.But no mirrors hung on the walls.No vanities occupied the gilt bedroom.No reflective sconces offered enough surface to see the damage.Just before I resorted to emptying drawers, I found a hand mirror on a dresser top and turned it over.
The facial hair I had worn from my time in prison had likely minimized the damage, as the lower half of my face sported nothing but a few minor cuts from shaving.Wounds on my forehead and cheek scabbed over on the right side of my face, still raw, still angry, but healing.Eventually, with time and salves, those would make a full recovery.
But the left side of my face....
I had already endured so many lowering experiences, but there had always been the possibility of restoration and reinstatement.Even as a bird, I had been given the tenuous possibility of being human again.But there was no remedy for being an ugly and ridiculous man.This was permanent, and I could do nothing about it.
If Alaina had been open to accepting me as a man, then surely this was what had prevented the continuation of her affections.No wonder Alaina had withdrawn from me.
I lowered the mirror.
“The surgeon said you would die from infection if he didn’t....”She could not verbalize the description of the procedure that took a significant portion of the left side of my nose, scarred my cheek, temple, and forehead, and deprived me of most of my left ear.“I couldn’t let you die.”
She would just see that I lived out the rest of my days in a different isolation and shame.Even though I had been ugly as a bird, I had still been whole.Maybe being blind in addition would have been preferable so that I would never have to fully know this reality.
“What did you have in mind for my future?”If she wanted to see me live, I was determined to find out why she thought this fate might be preferable to dying.“Do you need a disfigured jester for the Altanian court?I have experience.My suffering has entertained many.”
My left leg trembled with exertion and pain.I could not risk returning to the bed because I would have to turn around and face Alaina.Instead, I sank to the rug.I began laughing, afraid that if I did not find some hideous humor in it, I would devolve into weeping in earnest.And then I might never stop.
I didn’t even have my face for more than a few hours.And, sentimental fool that I was, I had allowed myself to hope in that brief time that Alaina might want me with her in Altania, not as some reclusive pet, but something more.As a man, albeit a foreign man without any connections and a past he would not disclose, I could have found reason to live among others and be at her side.How could she want me with her now?
She approached me from behind and joined me on the floor.She put her hand on my shoulder and rubbed it through the linen shirt.
“You can be whoever or whatever you want to be here,” she whispered.
“I should never have left Varnasia.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m selfish.And I give thanks both to the Great Holy and The Kind and Fair that you were in Ilyichia when I needed you most.”
“I don’t believe in fated purpose, higher or otherwise.If not me, someone else would have stepped forward to help you through.”
“Not likely.I needed someone who wasn’t like the rest of them.I needed you.”
“But you don’t need me here in Altania.”
“No, I don’t need you here in Altania.”She inched closer and rested her cheek against my back.“I want you here in Altania.”
“Why?So that all your acquaintances can mock your foreign oddity?”
“They would not dare mock my husband.”
Husband.
“No one sane would hold you to that,” I assured her, “not once they knew the circumstances and the inferiority of the groom.”
She tugged on a lock of hair at the nape of my neck in chastisement.“I will thank you not to speak so ill of my husband.”
“You are your brother’s heir,” I insisted.“You cannot be wedded to a disfigured foreign nobody.”
“I can be wedded to a noble man who earned grievous wounds by keeping me safe.”
“Gratitude is not enough.You deserve more, better.”
