Page 34 of Thief of Roses
XIV.
She spent the nextfew days in the kitchens, but the presence of the breakfast platter each morning distressed her.It sat accusatory every day.She nibbled off of it sometimes when she pretended it didn’t matter.She tried to ignore it at other times when she couldn’t pretend.She never wanted to share food with him again, but she missed their companionable mornings together over the platter.She hoped he never bothered her again, yet she longed to regain her ignorance so that she could reclaim her friend.She shuddered just thinking about him, recognizing his hideousness as an indication of his evil, but found herself longing for the moments when she had been certain that there was more to him.
After several days, she barricaded herself in her rooms.The platter showed up in her anteroom each day just as it had in the kitchens.She kept by the hearth and nibbled the food without having to think about their pleasant mealtime ritual.Although the Fir’Darl had never attempted to gain access to her rooms, when it was time to retire, she kept to her fortress bed on its side, grateful to have a place where she would be safe from him.
She spent her days torn between trying not to think about the monster that prowled the grounds and not able to think about anything else.Some days, the urge to pack up and leave overwhelmed her.Other days, she remembered that, even if she did want to go, she would have to find a new place to stay within the next few weeks.Staying offered the most practical solution to future concerns and so long as she could avoid the odious resident of the keep, then she could wait out the winter.When things began to thaw, she would leave.
By the time she reemerged from her room, he would be gone for the sake of her ovulation.It relieved her.She had been trying not to think about satisfying her building desires and the absence of what had been, prior to his revelation, a pleasant distraction both soothed her anxieties and amplified her frustrations.She busied herself with things that kept her from the kitchens.She did not want to dwell on his confessions.She did not want to think about him.She spent time mending her skirts and her shirts.She gathered the last flowers before they died, filling the kitchen table until it overflowed.She hung them around the fortress, utilizing the sconces, the hooks in the walls, the cauldron swing bracket, and any other peg she could find.
She admired her handiwork and wished she could share it with someone.She imagined sharing it with him.When all the flowers had been hung, she flopped in one of the chairs in the great hall, no longer quite as admiring of her efforts with the completion of the task.She put her face in her hands.She missed him.She recalled the story he told her to harden herself against the terrible loneliness which pervaded the fortress, telling herself that the loneliness of the keep would have made her miss anyone.But lying to herself didn’t work.She may have been grateful for any company, but she missed him in particular.She missed talking to him late into the night, watching the fire burn itself out, as they shared stories, usually tales of the gods to facilitate his grasp of Rivanic.She missed touching him, the brush of her fingers over the fine fur of his arms, feeling the muscles beneath ripple, shudder, or tense.She even missed the grotesque expressions, every thought and fear and pleasure writ large over that inhuman face while his compelling eyes danced.
She taught him to tan hides too when he first allowed her to see his kills.It had taken time and repetition to convince him that she lacked squeamishness and possessed every practical virtue to handle the dead quarry.He relented when she marveled over the tidiness of his kills and praised him over his ability to keep the pelts pristine.They skinned the animals together and he expressed his admiration when she extracted the brain from the skull and applied it to the hide to tan it.She took one of the fox hides, now cured, to bed with her and pretended that she ran her fingers through his fur.She told him things she would never dare say to his face, things she could only confess to the dark.
When she gave time and thought to all that he had told her, she found that she had begun to harbor grave doubts about his confessions.Yes, she could believe he had been disinterested in the suffering of others, passive and dismissive of the horrors that occurred around him, desensitized to the violence, and weak enough to have been complicit in it.But though those crimes were severe and impactful, they were broad and distant, easy to be a participant without having to see or experience the consequences of such actions, without having to question the moral ramifications of participation when raised in the twisted justifications of an unjust system.And though he may have been a participant and perpetuator of the system of oppression, somewhere in his long years rather than growing bitter and more entrenched in his hate with the fate he earned, he had managed the remarkable achievement of understanding his harm.
The more intimate horror he had related to her of rape and murder did not so easily reconcile itself.That was a strangely close and intimate act of a man who committed his crimes out of obligation and the hope of familial approval.He had an appropriate understanding of his harm from his actions toward the Rivani, a much harder thing to conceptualize than the more tangible horrors of murder and rape.Yet, though taking responsibility for it, he could not remember the incident itself, only the aftermath of it and the story that had been told to him.It reminded her of stories shared around the campfires, of betrayals and misdirections, and even the story of how Luca de Vacca became known as the Coward King centered around the falsified incrimination of his brother, Arturo.In Rivan stories, such happened frequently.Though stories did not reflect her mundane reality, surely such a thing could be possible.
For now, she would believe him, believe in his culpability because he himself confessed to it, but she would still harbor doubts, certain either through the disconnect of his story, the inconsistency of it with his character, and perhaps the thin mix of magic in her blood, that there had to be more to it.Even if he had done something heinous, perhaps it had not been of his own volition.He may not have been demonstrative of grief or remorse at the retelling of his past, but the distress in his voice betrayed deeper grief.He had lived with his guilt for many years.His own suffering may have taught him empathy and compassion, but did such things cure someone who thought rape and murder acceptable?She could see Baró being self-serving due to the normalization of apathetic cruelty and the consequences of going against the powerful personal relations who demanded his obedience.She could not see him so morally bankrupt as to enthusiastically defile and butcher a woman, Rivani or not, under the influence of too much ale.
Although his revelations to her did not absolve him, she had to acknowledge that he had shown immense integrity in relating to her that which might affect her feelings and affections.They had been friendly, perhaps moreso on her end than his, and she had begun thinking about him in ways that made the divine more earthly.He could easily have kept it hidden from her, pretended to be a paragon, accepted anything and everything she offered without the slightest hint of his shameful past.He could have taken advantage of her ignorance — she had asked him to!And yet, he willingly confessed himself so that she could be informed in their relationship going forward, whatever that relationship might look like after his confession.He also gave her the full and free ability to depart.The Baró she knew and the man whose past he had recounted did not feel like they could be the same individual.
She asked the Magic questions, looking for clarification or insight into Baró.The Magic never answered and the silence of the fortress oppressed her.If this abandoned, quiet prison had been part of his punishment, then it was a miracle that he had not lost his sanity in all the time he had spent here.She lost track of days and questioned herself constantly about the reality of her situation — and she had only done this for a matter of months.And yet, even in the midst of such punitive strangeness, he still kept his humor and his manners.
At the start of her blood time, she anticipated that even if she did not see him, he would return, but no such thing occurred.She stopped sleeping almost entirely.She told herself it was the silence.She told herself it was uneasy dreams.She told herself it was the Magic that pricked at her skin and whispered to her with stories she could not comprehend.
She whispered to the Magic one sleepless night, “He can come back.Please let him come back.”She banished him from her after all.Maybe, like everything else, the fortress needed clear words to undo what had been spoken.
Her restlessness got the better of her one day and she went in search of his rooms, hoping that he had just failed to make his presence known.She had asked the fortress to lead her there, wondering if the Magic would refuse because she did not ask him before she ventured.However, the Magic showed no loyalty as it obeyed her request.
“Thou art mystress here,”he had said to her on multiple occasions and they had been his parting words after the proclamation of his banishment.His wishes were just that — nothing to be acknowledged or obeyed.
“Baró?”Upon receiving no reply, she pressed the door inward.Although guilt at invading his private spaces gnawed at her, he had proclaimed her as mistress.
Mistress.More like a grubby scullery maid assigned to a housekeeper’s duties.But even Baró did not command over as much as she assumed.Gifts that weren’t gifts changed his body.His magic served others but not himself.This monster, the Fir’Darl, her Baró had no mastery here.He may have been massive and physically superior to any person, but something still misused him.He had been reduced to an instrument of magic that he could wield only for others.Not a master, but a servant.And if he could not leave and could not object, then a slave.Although she had fancied herself a prisoner here initially, she was visiting royalty and he was the dog she could kick if he were underfoot.He granted her requests and, she was beginning to suspect, suffered for them.If she was mistress, then he was nothing more than a captive resident designed to do her bidding and receive the violent recoil of magic use.
Whatever her thoughts, his rooms were not the rooms of a slave.They reflected the once palatial luxury evident throughout the livable areas of the fortress.Old-fashioned furnishings, faded through age and use, outfitted the apartment in the splendor of a bygone age.The hearth of the anteroom lay dark and cold.In a place that provided its own fires, the pile of wood beside it startled her.A poor pallet lay on the floor before the hearth.Despite the expensive comforts of the anteroom, Baró likely could not use them without either discomfort or damage.
How cruel to have all the appearance of luxury and have it be entirely inaccessible.
She passed through to the bedroom and gaped at the massive carved cabinet bed that occupied the bulk of floor space.The painting of the bed had chipped and faded into pastels and although she regarded the bed as having once been impressively gaudy, this piece had to have been costly beyond imagining.A canopy hung from above, draping the carved bed in majestic undulating brocade.The curtains that hung from the interior had been drawn back and tied to the posts to reveal a mattress in need of restuffing and as disused as the rest of the room.The backboard, painted with a charming but idealized bucolic scene, bore deep scoring, keeping the shepherd forever separated from the shepherdess in the tableau.
Linens covered other furniture as if the original occupants had just gone away for the season.She lifted them tentatively to see what they kept safe.The wardrobe occupied the most space after the bed.It dwarfed the one in her bedroom and she twisted the handle to open it and determine if this one too possessed magic or not.She could not tell.The wardrobe contents spilled out with the opening of the door, velvet and satin suits that had once been bright jewel-toned ensembles flapped at her in their faded and somewhat tattered state as if attempting to relate to her how neglected they were as they exploded from the door and hung there eager for inspection.She almost did not touch them, but her curiosity got the better of her and she extracted an embellished and embroidered dark blue pile and laid it out on the bed.The robe and doublet looked expensive, hundreds of years out of style, and roughly Baró-sized.Anyone else attempting to wear them would have appeared like a child in their parent’s clothes.She tried to imagine Baró attempting to wear such absurd clothing and could not.She stroked the luxurious fabric.Such stitching and ornamentation must have taken the finest tailors eons.Yet such flagrant pretenses at humanity would only make Baró appear more out of place.He was a creature of nature, not of artifice.Even if his shape developed through malicious intent, he better embodied a feral earthy magic that transcended the mundane and crossed over to mythic.Maybe for a man, this overwrought melodramatic attire would have made sense, but for him as he was, it would make him look like a mockery.Her mind went unbidden to those “tamed” bears who had been tortured into “speaking” and “dancing” all while wearing the costume of a clown.Just like those bears, these beautiful clothes only achieved in setting Baró up as something subhuman and worthy of ridicule.They lent him all the beauty of their human elegance while restraining his natural power and making the idea of his inhumanity all the more potent for the absurdity of him being allowed to “pretend to be a man.”The idea made her ill.She gathered the clothing and shoved it back into the wardrobe.Those clothes most certainly did not belong to her Baró.
She almost curtailed her inspection after that.Almost.Another covered piece of furniture caught her attention and piqued her curiosity.She lifted the cover, but it did not show much as it caught on some of the ornamental components of the object.She finally gave in and removed it completely, surprised to see a gilt gothic trifold with the middle panel made of reflective glass.She had seen mirrors before.They were not so rare as to be unidentified when faced with one.This one, however, utilized black glass and spoke of significant age.She settled upon the small bench in front of it, feeling like she had just trespassed on something significant.Had Baró used this mirror to see how his body changed?She could little imagine him perching on such a small bench though.She skimmed her hands over the top surface of the vanity piece and then inspected the drawers.She opened several, and though there was little to find, her inspection did at least reveal a small lacquered box.
The box, no bigger than her palm, must have appeared ridiculously small in Baró’s big hands.The box had been hand-painted, a cream background with a large red rose on the lid.The glaze had crazed and the finishes had become discolored over the years.The lacquer along the underside edge had chipped away from handling and the lid did not give.She feared breaking it, but the lid finally surrendered with the aid of her fingernails.The contents consisted only of a long thin strand of braided hair coiled inside like a peaceful sleeping cat.She extracted the coil, put the box down, and stretched the flaxen strand out to its full length.Rivani ran her fingers over it.She wrapped it around her hand and brought it closer to inspect it.
A braid was more intimate than any stack of love letters.
Baró pronounced himself incapable of tenderness or gentleness or softness.He condemned himself as unfeeling.Perhaps telling her that he never experienced love had been his way of condemning himself further and confirming that he would forever be unloved and unlovable.
He lied.Baró had loved at least once before.
“Did he ever tell you what he did?”She asked the strand of hair.She paused and when nothing happened, she sighed.
Perhaps the person from whom the hair had come had never known Baró’s past.Maybe Baró’s feelings had not been shared, but no one gave hair like that without some degree of affection.Rivani stroked the braid again before coiling it and returning it to the box.She did not replace the lid, continuing to stare at the hair, golden and glistening in the light.She put her head in her hands.
