Dead leaves drifted down to the earth.
Bare, skeletal boughs whipped in the violent gusts, and icy sheets of rain drove against hills that were bleeding into a muddy, desaturated gray.
From her perch on the windowsill, Talia watched the grim landscape, pressing her face against the cold glass as a troop of mounted men rode into the castle courtyard.
Through the blur of rain, she caught sight of Varkas astride his great gray warhorse. She watched his fluid, practiced grace as he swung down from the saddle.
He tossed the reins to an attendant and threw back his soaked mantle, laying bare features as pale and severe as carved marble. He looked so detached, so regal, that it was nearly impossible to reconcile him with the brute who drove her to the brink night after night.
Talia wiped the fog from the pane with the side of her hand, staring down at him, but when he turned his head in her direction, she pulled the heavy curtains shut.
That solitary glimpse had set her skin burning and thrown her pulse into disarray. Biting her lip, she stepped down from the sill and curled up before the hearth. Even the roar of the fire did nothing to quiet her trembling.
She drew her knees against her chest and buried her face in them.
She no longer knew how to bear herself around him. Ever since she had yielded to sharing his bed, the clear lines of her life had snarled into an intolerable knot.
At times, the man who walked in the sun and the man who moved in the dark felt like two distinct creatures.
By daylight, his demeanor was unaltered—remote and cold, wearing a face that seemed never to have harbored an impulse in all his life.
Yet the man veiled in shadow was entirely other. That shadow, half-glimpsed in the dimness, was as raw and unyielding as the old pagan kings of the East who had once brought empires to their knees.
She pressed her thighs together against the dull throb left behind from his relentless weight the night before. Heat rushed to her face until her cheeks stung.
She had never imagined him so ferocious in bed. Had he not spent years living like an ascetic monk?
Considering that these encounters had only begun because she had forced the matter, his quiet ferocity unsettled her.
It was stranger still when she remembered the court women in the Imperial Palace, how every one of them who had tried to tempt him had walked away empty-handed.
‘…Was he like this with Ayla, too?’
Her thoughts turned, as they always did, toward self-inflicted wounds.
She had assumed he was a man void of desire, merely performing the obligations expected of Ayla’s betrothed.
Perhaps they had shared more than she knew. He was, after all, someone who could pour such brutal hunger into her flesh and then look at her the next morning as if they were strangers.
He might easily have done all this with Ayla behind closed doors while playing the dignified suitor to the world. In fact, he almost certainly had.
She could never be special to anyone. Life had taught her that lesson long ago.
If he wanted her, it was only because he could want anyone. Had he married another woman, he would have touched her with the very same intent.
‘So stop reading meaning into it.’
“Oh, stop that! Stop picking at your lip!”
The sharp voice sliced through the heavy quiet. Talia started, her head jerking up.
Nanny stood over her with a broad wicker basket under one arm, glaring.
“If it scabs over, the lip rouge won’t sit right.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway…”
Varkas won’t see me in the dark. She nearly snapped the words out, but caught herself in time.
Nanny went into a frenzy every evening over her appearance. If she found out all her fussing was hidden by the pitch-black room, her nagging would only grow worse.
Talia tucked her bloodied fingernails beneath the folds of her skirts and laid her forehead against her knees. Nanny clicked her tongue in disdain and set the basket on the table.
“Stop brooding and take this. The apothecary just finished brewing the herbs from Her Majesty.”
Talia grimaced at the bowl of bitter, murky brew.
Since returning to the capital, Senevier had sent tonic after tonic intended to hasten conception. It was an unspoken decree to bend to her will, and Nanny played the part of the Empress’s dutiful instrument to perfection.
She thrust the dark concoction right under Talia’s nose.
“Come on, drink it down. Her Majesty made it very clear you’re not to miss a single day.”
Talia took the bowl with reluctant hands and emptied it in one swallow.
It tasted like boiling silt. Fighting the violent urge to retch, she grabbed the pitcher, splashed water into a cup, and rinsed her mouth.
Suddenly, Varkas’s sneer cut through her mind—how she seemed content to play the broodmare. She pressed her bleeding lips together and choked down the humiliation.
‘This was my own choice. I don’t have to feel ashamed.’
She repeated it silently, dragging the back of her hand across her wet mouth, only for Nanny’s eager voice to jar her back.
“Shall we start preparing you, then?”
Talia turned her head and scowled as the older woman began shaking out dresses from the cedar trunk. It was taken as a given now that she would go to his bed again tonight.
She looked toward the rain-streaked window. Having ridden in soaked through, Varkas would be bathing. After that, he would work through the duties he had set aside. With his affairs piling up of late, he would likely be occupied until late evening. Yet even as she reasoned this through, her feet carried her away from the hearth.
Unbinding her heavy braids, Talia walked over to the tub the servants had prepared. The water was lukewarm and heavy with perfumed oils. She slid into it, and Nanny came up behind her to work lather through her hair.
Yielding to those rough, familiar hands, she looked down at her own skin.
Every place his mouth had lingered was marked with crimson blossoms. Talia traced the feverish spots with the pads of her fingers, feeling a sudden wave of vertigo, and let her eyelids fall shut.
What she had planned as an occasional, calculated duty had slipped into an ordinary, nightly rhythm.
At first, she had knocked upon his door once every three days. Then, before she realized what was happening, she had begun going to his room every single night.
She made up excuses—that she was only placating Nanny’s ceaseless demands, or that she needed to bear a child as quickly as possible to buy her peace—but some corner of her mind knew it was a lie. With each passing day, tearing herself from his arms grew harder.
When she left him to lie alone in her vast bed, a hollow ache settled in her ribs, and whenever she washed away the scent of him, an ugly reluctance pulled at her heart.
She despised herself for it, yet she could not arrest the slide. The wretched sickness that had plagued her since she was nine years old was clawing its way back to the surface.
‘No. That isn’t what this is. I’m only using him.’
She shoved the thought away in frantic denial.
She could not allow herself to sink into that mire again.
Setting her jaw, Talia stepped from the bath. She dried herself with a soft linen towel and slipped into the blue velvet gown she had brought with her from the capital.
She knew well enough that Varkas would never see it in the dark, but she refused to stand before him looking like a pauper.
She held her breath before the vanity mirror, staring at features that resembled Senevier’s far too closely, then rose to her feet.
She opened the door to find the corridor lit with sconces.
As her slippers met the runner, she glanced toward the window where the storm was lashing the glass. A flash of lightning ripped through the pitch-black sky.
Talia watched the thunderous gloom for a breath, then resumed her stride.
When she arrived outside his quarters, the attendant stationed there pulled the heavy door open as though he had been waiting.
Talia crossed the threshold into the dark, her steps cautious.
Just then, another bolt of lightning tore open the night, carving the silhouette of a man by the window in bone-white light.
END