Page 32 of Thief of Roses
“You smell so good,” he confessed.“You will be hard-pressed to keep me away, threat of boarberries be damned.”She blushed in turn, bringing him over to the bench for tending.Just before she was done painting his face with salve, he asked her, “Do you want me to tell you now?”
“No.Tomorrow.Tell me tomorrow.”
He asked her the nextthree days if she wanted to know what he had done to merit the tortuous lifestyle she had stumbled upon.Each time, she said no.
“I want to know everything about you,” she confessed one day, “but what if you’re right?I’ve been testing out the limits of my imagination by asking what-ifs — what if you lure people here to kill them?Or desecrate graves?Or run swords through blind orphans?I cannot imagine it, but I also know that I don’t want to imagine it.I know you hunt and I still cannot reconcile what I know of you with the violence of taking down prey.So, not today.Please.”
On the fourth day, he didn’t ask her.
“You need to know, Rivani.”
“Not today,” she groaned, putting her hundredth or thousandth jar away.
“But not yesterday.And not the day before.Or the day before that.”He took the jars she attempted to put on the top shelves and placed them there himself.
“And not ever?”She smiled up at him.“Baró, please, we have been such good friends.Please, don’t ruin it.”
“You must know.I must tell you.I will only compound my crimes if I let you go on pretending that I am some noble creature cruelly misused when I am no such thing.”
She gulped and looked away as if he had chastised her.
“That’s it, isn’t it?I’m usually pragmatic, but maybe it’s this place, thick with magic, making me fanciful.It’s easy to look at you, knowing that you were once a man —”
His eyes widened and he shook his head.
“That you once looked like a man,” she corrected, “and pretend that the animalism is just part of a facade.That beneath it, there is a tragic romantic figure.I’m being unfair to you about living up to some false ideal.Is that why you have been...”She shook her head.“We can peacefully coexist but not truly be friends unless I know.”
“I have enjoyed your company and have appreciated all your attentions, but I do not deserve them.And I cannot let you think that I do.”
He sat on the bench, his legs on the outside of it, elbows back on the table.He would no longer receive those sweet casual touches that he so treasured or be the recipient of those fond looks.He knew not to be regretful though, just grateful that he had received anything at all.Once he told Rivani, that would be that.She would leave.She would have to leave.
“Please, sit.No.No closer,” he instructed as she took a step towards him.If she were there beside him, trying to be consoling or empathetic or compassionate, then he could not get it all out.And if he still somehow managed to do so, then she would withdraw from him and he did not want to suffer that as well.
She sat on the bench where he indicated, a few feet separating them.
Going to tell her then?She asked.She’ll leave you, you know.
And then Thou shalt go away too.That was the only benefit to this unfortunate situation he could imagine, so he clung to that as consolation.
I’m surprised you’re telling her now.Why not wait until after she tells you she loves you?She’ll never say it if you tell her before the words come out of her mouth.
And yf she sayeth before she knoweth, he countered, then she wyll hath loved a versionne of me that hath not exysted and such feelyngs art not love of me.‘Twill not count.
It wasn’t warm approval, but there was an element of impressed condescension which was more than he expected.
How much you’ve grown.
Y thought such was the objectyve.The air cleared.
“Baró?”
He glanced at Rivani, swallowed the reluctance that calcified in his throat, and told her.
“You have called meprideful and vain.I have always been so, I fear, although in my youth, being both compounded my aptitude towards callousness.”He kept his eyes fixed upon his folded hands.“My family fostered hardness of character and worked to destroy any tenderness of spirit.I surrendered to their upbringing, but when you know nothing else, does one not grow to follow the same crooked path laid before them?”
He sighed, not knowing how to discuss this, how to tell her without making it sound like he blamed others for his own reprehensible behavior.He had been a coward then, soft and complacent in the assurance of his own privilege, and now, too late but at least with self-awareness, he took it all upon himself.But the explanations?How did he do that without bringing in the enabling misguidance of his environment?
“I was raised as a follower of the Great Holy, but not as one who holds to his heart the virtues and ideals that, I believe, are espoused in most religious teachings.For us – for me – such following was pageantry and performance, to delude others into believing I led a righteous life with Holy-sanctioned causes.My existence was a well-crafted lie, shaped into a narrative that conformed with the rest of my family and peers.I made the motions.I took the path expected of me.Privately, our lives were different, filled with deadly politicking, personal moral deficiencies, and a plethora of depravity.We decayed from the inside out, but so long as we presented as we had to, that was all that mattered.
