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He offered his other hand and she accepted it gently in her fingers.
“Can you heal it more slowly this time?” he asked.
She didn’t respond, but curious at such an unusual request, she was able to slow down the process. She watched his face, focused and fascinated against the subtle glow of the light. His demeanor held the potential for violence but the mystery of a child, watching the act of healing as if it were sacred.
When she was done, he said thoughtfully, “Veilin don’t practice healing beyond the basics.” He lifted his hand up and inspected it in the torchlight. “You all heal well on your own and you don’t make a practice of healing us. The wounds and illnesses humans sustain never require advanced healing, and so you rarely make it an art form. Your curse drove you to master an art most have neglected, and without circumstance as it is precisely in this moment, that curse would have killed you. Few can remove a curse like that, and few Venennin ever would for a Veilin’s sake.” He lowered his hand and flipped his palm open in front of her. “How lucky for both of us.”
They watched each other in the pause that followed, and she understood the rare nature of their circumstances. After everything she’d learned, she imagined there were never any two people less likely to help each other, and simply by being here, it felt like she was breaking a century’s worth of rules and traditions.
But why? She was losing her sense of how any of it could be wrong, and she had a feeling that it wasn’t a good thing.
He closed the space between them again, one hand stroking along her cheek as he searched her eyes. “Now,” he breathed, “It’s a shame you and I didn’t get to negotiate our little agreement. But I did demonstrate how useful it might be, didn’t I?”
I’ll kill for you. You heal for me.
“You just want to heal. You’re tired of fighting. You don’t want political games or power, but you need them.” His fingertips stroked down her arm, his other hand coiling his fingers into hers. His touch mirrored the balm and temptation of his words. “Your reluctance to kill will kill you, but with my help, you would never need to,” he whispered again and then rested his head on the nape of her neck. He seemed tired in her presence as if he too had a burden to exchange. He breathed her in as he kissed the words against the sensitive skin of her collarbone. She felt the tension in her body yield to him, and reached a hand for his clothes, gripping his shirt like she meant to push him back but finding instead that she steadied herself against him.
With his kiss his tone changed from tempting to beseeching, and his lips seemed to poison her with the feeling, weakness spreading from her neck, to her shoulders and the rest of her body. Her mind battled his offer, but their bodies spoke a language all their own, and whatever he asked, she seemed to answer without objection.
“In your reluctance to cause pain,” he whispered, “A heart that was a burden to me, would be simple for you.” He kissed aslow line along her neck toward her jaw, her breath quickening as he offered promises in between. “You’ll give me life.”
She considered the ideas as if he were speaking into the openness of her mind.
“You’ll never be imprisoned again,” he said.
She struggled to truly understand the implications and still couldn’t find them alarming.
Leave me behind.He’d demanded in the carriage.
“You’ll never feel powerless,” he chided.
Her free hand pushed at his chest, the last fiber of resistance that screamed the words she said next. “You,” she replied firmly, swallowing as she tried to build resolve into her words.
As if sensing the coming statement he found her eyes and she tried to form a firm stare.
“You,” she hesitated, trying to find how to express her next words, “You’ve–” How would she describe what he’d done just now? “You’ve healed me.”
His eyes flickered at the use of the word.
“I’m grateful, but I need to go. Now.”
She expected him to object, or for some mask to drop and expose the monster lurking beneath, but his expression softened and the smile he offered next seemed to relinquish her before he kissed her a final time. The longing in his words came through in his lips. She forgot her objection entirely, and felt her body bloom openbeneath him as she melted back against the altar and he wrapped her up.
Her own words from a moment before struck her with the reality of their depth when she remembered how some people clung to her as she healed them. They held her hands in place as if she were healing something deeper than their wounds, and she hated the striking recognition that she now felt the same in his arms. She’d felt the same when he’d kissed her before and when his fingers had moved slowly beneath hers, tracing her skin. The fact that his bloodstained hands could invite such a feeling, that his lips, so capable of uttering harsh truths, could embody such immersive and all-consuming warmth was cutting. All of it was cutting, as if a feeling that had once been so pure and cherished was no longer real, because a being capable of such violence was capable of producing it in her.
She clutched his clothes and wondered if she’d ever made others feel this way? She’d judged the desperate masses that ripped and clung to skin and clothes in Virday, and in the wake of this, she felt like she was one of them.
She felt hunger and emptiness and something like desperation, a chasm that perhaps had always been there, ripped open inside her. Aching, she felt like one of the wanting masses, her hands wandering from his torn clothes over his bare chest, and as if her touch incited the same in him, his hands folded her into him like hot glass, molding her chest to his, and her thighs to his waist.
The closer he was, the closer she wanted him to be and as his fingers slipped across her bare stomach they no longer traced warmth, but fire, and for the first time in her life the realization sunk in that she was completely out of control. She wasburning.
Maybe her parents had been right to isolate her like they had.
That accusation hit harder than the rest, the thought like a betrayal against her own soul. The last fragile frame that reflected all that she understood about herself and the world shattered into a thousand pieces.
He eased her up in his arms, pulling away as if he could sense the tension in her. She knew he could sense it because she’d let him close, skin to skin, and muscle to muscle. She knew he could taste it because she’d opened her lips to his, her mouth to his.
Just as she’d expected disdain at her illness, when she looked into his eyes again, she expected that his gaze would reflect the judgment by which she judged herself. In his strength, perhaps he’d look upon her want with disdain, just as she had looked down on the people in Virday. Instead, she saw only a satisfaction she did not understand.
