Page 12 of Thief of Roses
She paused.Should she thank the wardrobe?She would have thanked the Magic earlier, but knowing that the Fir’Darl took responsibility for her shelter and care, she would not express gratitude.No one wanted to be indebted to the gods, even the benevolent ones.She wanted to avoid being indebted to the Fir’Darl.
“You’re being nonsensical,” she told herself.“You need new clothes and now you have new clothes.You might have been able to make them or acquire them when you left here, but now you cannot leave, so it falls to him to provide.You owe him nothing save that which you have promised — your time.”
She did not thank the wardrobe.
These past few days spent trying to avoid the Fir’Darl confined her to the solar and though self-imposed, it ill-suited her to be sedentary.Even with her own luxurious bedroom and spacious antechamber, her restless nature would compel her to seek out occupation.And maybe here she did not have to work — the Fir’Darl had not asked it of her.Maybe she could forgo scrubbing and laundry and cooking, but she still needed to keep busy.She would make her oils and salves and perfumes and store them until next year.She would dry grasses and weave baskets if she ever found enough attention for it.Together, they would purchase a new horse and perhaps a new cart if she could not recover hervyardin.The Fir’Darl only put a provision on the roses, not the rest of the flowers and herbs.
She had tried planting the rose cuttings anyway.After all that fuss and a year of her life, she better try to at least make the sacrifice worth it.If they took root, she’d sell the damn things, when she left of course.The Fir’Darl didn’t seem to want them afterward but that was foolish since you could only do anything useful with flowers after they’d been cut.More fool him then.She had left the potted cuttings down in the solar, knowing she would have to bring them out for sunlight but still not willing to touch them, feeling sick each time she did.She’d get over it.She would have to.Roses, unlike most of the flowers she handled, did not take care of themselves.Maybe the Fir’Darl’s did, but she had yet to see that for herself.
She had potted the other cutting too, but did not have much hope for it.She could maintain plants if she had to, but she did not think she was up to the task of ensuring their unqualified survival after an intentional beheading.Still, she would try, if only to give her something more exciting to do than scrub floors, although on the list of things that she found exciting, watching plants grow was just below scrubbing floors.
At least the bedroom and anteroom did not need to be scrubbed.Small mercies.
She set about gathering the fabrics from the bed and creating a pallet in the center of the felled piece of furniture.Today, if she could believe the Fir’Darl, she would not have to worry about seeing him.And although there existed many reasons to distrust him, he sounded sincere when he told her he would not burden her with his company.She may as well make the most of it.
VII.
She needn’t have botheredtrying to avoid him.She did not see him or converse with his disembodied voice for another sennight.By that point, her exasperation almost inspired her to call him out and tell him to put an end to this charade, god or not.She refrained only because not having him present meant she would receive yet another unexpected reprieve from the endurance of his company.She could almost pretend that she was alone again.Almost.Her focus, however, was on the concoction in the pot that hung from the swing bracket in the kitchens, far too absorbed in how she was going to obtain the animal fat for her balms to hear the faltering gait of the Fir’Darl coming up the path to the open kitchen door.She only noticed the change when something swallowed the sunlight and plunged the room into shadow.
She jumped and cursed herself for not having anticipated it.Her heart raced as she directed her attention to the doorway and the immense figure that took up the whole of it.She could not see his face nor, indeed, any part of his front due to the radiant light shining from behind him like a golden halo, blinding her with the dazzling brightness that cast the most monstrous and ugly of the Rivan gods in divine silhouette.
On all fours, he had been nearly her height already, but upright, he stood taller than any person she had ever encountered, dwarfing her even though she was of good stature herself.His shoulders spanned the breadth of the doorway and the spiraled horns forced him to bow his head to enter the room.He stopped just inside the kitchen, more light filtering around him and allowing her to glimpse the rest of his aspect.
She remembered emptying the contents of her stomach when she had first beheld him and so she expected the horror of him.Yet her memory softened her recollections.The wave of nausea returned.She managed to keep her meal even as she held her breath.She could not even say that it was ugliness that caused her reaction.Although she could not deny that he was ugly, the wrongness of him revived her terrors.The Fir’Darl’s face most resembled that of a bull, but not one she had ever met.She had always thought bovids lovely creatures — placid, liquid-eyed, velvet-muzzled.While the Fir’Darl had similar, enormous, soulful eyes and the furred muzzle of the more commonplace creatures, he better resembled a caricature of one.Skin pulled taut over his cheeks, teeth sharp and threatening, his eyes displayed far too much intelligence.His furred skin shone like burnished bronze and masses of black curls draped over his shoulders, the like of which would have been the envy of any woman.The sculpted contours of his chest and torso spoke of hard labor while displaying the lean grace of a feral animal.He bore scars over his entire body, the most prominent of which resided along his side and abdomen, pinched and puckered wounds repeated many times over.His hips appeared unusually wide but she did not get any further in her study.The coarse, loose breaches hid anything lower from view.
She blushed and swallowed down an awkward lump in her throat.She hoped she did not betray where her mind had wandered.
“Y bid thee goode morrow, Rivani,”he said.He gestured to the pot.“Woldest thou seke to poisonne me so soone?”
She had forgotten the unearthly quality of his voice and shuddered.Deep, dark, and textured, the voice emanated from somewhere not of his throat.Perhaps the sound came from his chest and the words from his throat instead of his teeth or his tongue where a man’s would form.The eerie precision of words betrayed the practiced nature of them, as if words did not exist for a being such as he, and he had adopted them for the plebeian communication of mortals.
“No poison yet,”she said, struggling with his archaic speech.“Although I cannot promise that such a thing will not find its way in the stew pot before long.”
“Yf thy brew mayeth wayt, Y woldest command thy attentionne for but a few moments.”
She sighed, forgetting in her dismay that this was one of her gods requesting her presence.She stood and brushed off.
