Page 168 of Mother of Death and Dawn

But it also took my pain away.

There was no shame in those things. Perhaps that desire for blood was just as invigorating as the taste of sugar on my lips.

“Perhaps,” I said. “But I am learning to find joy in hunger. And I had never been hungrier than that.”

We rounded a corner. We were now far behind the palace. I saw movement ahead, where the gardens gave way to the trees of the forest. In the darkness, it took me a moment to decipher what I was looking at: two forms, tangled up so that they were an indecipherable mass of limbs, fabric bunched around bare skin. Golden hair, cooler than usual beneath the moonlight. A single silver-gold wing.

It was Meajqa, I realized, entangled with a woman. He pressed her against a tree. Her legs wrapped around his waist. His lips were against her throat, and her face, covered by her dark hair, was thrown back in pleasure. Their discarded clothes sat in a pile of fine fabric in the dirt.

Caduan let out a huff of a laugh and tugged my arm. “I suppose we’ll go another way.”

We took the opposite path, now walking through the western gardens.

I was silent.

Despite myself, I replayed the image of them in my mind. They looked strange, ungraceful, nothing but a tangle of bodies and movements too hungry to be elegant. And yet there was a beauty to the hunger of it—or fulfillment of it.

When I was Aefe, long ago, I knew the pleasure of sex. But as Reshaye, I didn’t understand it, not even when I experienced those desires as Tisaanah or Maxantarius had felt them. I had looked at the carnal uselessness of it and been confused. What was the purpose of such feelings?

But…

I pictured the pleasure on that woman’s face, brazen and impassioned.

“Aefe?”

“Hm?”

I hadn’t realized he was talking to me.

Caduan seemed amused. “You look like you’re thinking very hard.”

I said, without hesitation, “Meajqa asked me if I wanted to have sex with him.”

Caduan choked, lurching to a stop. “He what?”

“He didn’t use those words. But that was what he was asking.”

Caduan looked straight ahead, blinking twice, not moving. I had never seen him behave this way.

He cleared his throat and continued walking. “What did you say?”

“I said no.”

The muscles of Caduan’s jaw flexed.

Realization dawned on me.

Could that be jealousy? Possession? When I had been Reshaye, I had wanted nothing but to consume and be consumed by the person I was with. It was a desire so deep and so all-encompassing that it took over all of me. That was love, and it was awash with jealousy.

If Caduan felt jealousy, did that mean that he loved me?

Because jealousy meant love, yes?

This string of epiphanies hit me one after the other, knocking me somewhat off kilter.

“You could have said yes,” he said. “If you had wanted to.”

For some reason, I was a bit hurt by that.

---