“I began going outside at Cael’s suggestion. I walked in your marketplace and smiled longingly at your statue. The sun hurt my eyes at first, but it felt good on my skin. I began to feel alive again and eager to see you.”
Kurit smiled at me lovingly, just as he used to, so long before the madness. I almost wept at the sight, both in relief and sadness for time lost. “Aenna, I love you. I have missed you, and not merely these past few weeks. I have missed living with you. I have been foolish, and while some things may have been outside of my control, others were not, and I owe you a great deal of kindness and affection for what I have put you through.”
He came to my side and tentatively reached out a trembling hand to touch my cheek. When I felt the warmth of his palm, I was overcome with too many emotions, and tears flowed forth from my eyes.
Kurit knelt beside my chair and whispered, “Please, no more tears. I cannot bear to make you cry anymore. If this is too much for you, I can leave—”
“No!” I said louder than I intended. I shook my head and said in a lower volume, “No. Please, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to weep like this—it’s just that it’s all so much.” I began wiping the tears away brusquely.
“Let me, please,” he said gently as he brushed his fingertips softly on my cheeks. By the Gods, his eyes, his touch—it was as if he had woken from the dead and come to rescue me from his wretched self. It felt as though I was falling in love with him again, though I had not ceased loving him before. The intensity of it drove me to further tears, and as usual, I cursed myself inwardly for them.
“I can’t keep up this way, Aenna. May I hold you?” he asked.
I nodded. We rose, and I fell into his waiting arms. In the same instant I experienced both joy at his touch and horror to know that I had betrayed him in his cousin’s embrace. I felt for several minutes that I might be ill, so I held my breath as much as I could in order to settle my stomach.
“It was my greatest fear that I had killed your affection for me,” he whispered as he kissed the top of my head.
“Kurit,” I said weakly, “if I had been able to stop loving you, the pain of everything after that would have been negligible. “
He squeezed me tighter, and I regretted my words. I had not meant to cause him further anguish. It was then that I realized I believed his apologies and promises to make things right. My mind reeled against that, telling me that I was bound to be crushed again by this man if I trusted him fully. Yet I knew, in my heart, that I did believe him and trust him. No pattern of logic could dissuade that.
“I do love you, Kurit.” I pulled back from his embrace to look at him sincerely. “And though it might not be the wisest course, I believe you when you say that you have set about making things right. I believe you, and I’m proud of you for having given up your addiction.”
He shook his head slowly. “That is kind, Aenna, but I still must prove myself to you. I take strength from my desire to prove to you that I can live without drunkenness. I admit, a large part of the inspiration is not from you but rather from knowing that I have finally relieved myself of the burden of my mother’s madness. But the rest of it is inspired to do what is right for you, my good wife, and for our son. And I suppose somewhere in the mixture is a sense of duty by my kingdom, but truly, though that possibly should be the foremost motivation, it is not. I simply cannot bear to let you down again. I cannot fathom the idea of having my son raised by a drunken brute.
“Aenna, striking you was the most revolting, unacceptable, and evil thing I have ever done. In time, I hope you can forgive me for it, but you should know that I never shall.” He put a finger to his forehead and said, “In here shall always live the image of you sprawled out of the floor from my hand’s strike. I would sooner die than ever do such a thing again, and I shall use that memory to ensure I am never again tempted to lose control inside a glass.”
Kurit pulled me back towards him in a tender embrace, kissing my forehead repeatedly. “I love you, my Aenna,” he said. “I shall spend the rest of my days proving that to you.”
After a few minutes of a silent embrace, he cautiously asked, “Is it too soon for me to request the honour of kissing you?”
I leaned back in his arms and smiled. “You may request it,” I gently teased, trying to lighten the tension.
Kurit smiled endearingly and, in his best formal voice eloquently asked, “Dearest Queen Aenna, whom I love and adore beyond all things, whom I have wronged but seek now to pay loving restitution, would you do this humble man the honour of granting him a kiss?”
I laughed delightedly for a moment, and then said, “I would like that very much.”
Kurit slipped his hand behind my head and pulled me towards him. When our lips met, I had to suppress a shudder, but the anxiety faded as I felt his mouth moving slowly against my own. His kisses were different than Jarik’s, I realized—neither better nor worse, but certainly different. Less intense, but somehow happier. Then I realized I was too busy thinking to enjoy the kiss, and I promptly told my mind to hush itself.
When the kiss ended, he followed it with another on my cheek and then one on my forehead as he held me against him once more. “Everything shall be well again, Aenna, I promise you that. We shall know happiness again. All of us: you, me, Raelik, and even Jarik. Poor Jarik, the man has ached to put me in my place but has not done so for your sake. I should go speak with him, and tell him of the promises I have made you, and make them to him as well. I have missed his friendship.”
Then he stiffened as though something was wrong, and my heart leapt in fear. He stepped back out of the embrace and said, “I almost forgot!” He went quickly to the door between the workrooms, disappeared into his for a moment, and then returned, closing the door once more behind him.
Kurit held out a closed hand before me. I looked at him in puzzlement.
“I have something for you, if you would accept it,” he said tenderly. When he slowly opened his fingers, I saw sitting on his palm a golden chain, and affixed to it a pendant of two hearts entwined. It was almost exactly like the one that had been torn from my neck by my fiendish abductors.
“When you returned from Wusul and I bathed you, I noticed the one I gave you before was gone,” he said softly. “But at the time, there were so many other things to worry about. I had this made as you were recovering, but there never seemed the proper time to give it to you. I intended to do so on the night you had first conceived the notion of your marketplace when I was to come to your room, but as you well know, I foolishly fell asleep drunk and disappointed you. After that, things were always simply too awful to think of this. And if everything is still too upsetting and you do not wish it now, then I can put it away again,” he said with a bit of sadness in his voice.
“Kurit, it would make me dearly happy to have you put it around my neck right now,” I said, trembling, knowing the meaning of the gift. It was a symbol of our love and union. I wanted that back.
He smiled like a little boy as he stepped behind me to clasp the chain around my neck. I touched the pendant with my fingertips; it felt right, as though it had been there all along.
Kurit put his hands on my shoulders, and I turned to face him. He was still smiling. I put my arms around him again and felt joy as he did likewise.
When we ended the embrace, he took my hands up and kissed them happily. “I should speak with my cousin now,” he said. “Do you wish to come with me? To see Jarik, I mean?”
I shook my head. “My face is still puffy from my silly tears. Besides, knowing my Champion, he is but a few paces outside that door. Why don’t you take him into your workroom and speak with him? You can tell him that I’m safely next door, that he might relax sufficiently to speak with you.”
Kurit touched my cheek fondly again and nodded. “I shall do just that,” he said, “and then perhaps you will come with me to be with our boy. I have missed him as well, and though he is too young to understand, I wish to pledge to him too that I will not
fail either of you again.”
With that, Kurit went to my door and opened it. He laughed and turned back to me to say, “Wise Queen, you spoke the truth, for here stands your Champion, not five paces from your door.” He held an arm outside, and Jarik came to the doorway.
Jarik looked at me in concern, so I quickly smiled and said, “I am fine, Jarik. You and Kurit have things to speak about. I shall be right here, so you needn’t worry.”
Jarik looked at Kurit, then me again and said bluntly, “You have been weeping.”
“For relief,” I said, rubbing the last of the tears from my cheeks. “For happy, sweet relief. Go now. Honestly, Jarik, I am feeling better than I have for a long time. Both of you go to Kurit’s workroom and speak kindly to each other.”
They both nodded. Kurit closed my door as he left.
I sat back down and sighed with relief, though I felt another shudder of guilt for knowing I had betrayed Kurit. I knew also that Jarik and I would have to sit with him soon and tell him what had occurred while we were all still experiencing the spirit of hope and forgiveness. Kurit had made an effort to set things right. It would be unfair, I told myself, to keep a significant truth from him. I knew that he would be hurt and possibly angry, but for some reason I believed that if we were honest soon, it could all be worked out without anyone having to be sent away.
I realized that that was my real fear—that Kurit would send Jarik away, and Jarik, in an attempt to be loyal and honourable, would indeed go. And while that might have been the best thing for Jarik, to go and forget about his love for me, I very selfishly wanted him to be with me as my beloved friend forever.
As I pondered my conflicting emotions of relief and secret shame, the outward door of my workroom opened without so much as a polite knock. Kasha strode purposefully into the room, turning my blood cold.
She closed the door behind her, turned the bolt to lock it, and stood staring at me blankly. Then I noticed she was smiling. Very quietly, almost whispering, she said, “You have returned after all.”
My heart beat so hard in my chest that I wondered if she heard it. I wondered if it were possible that she had taken Kurit’s words to heart and had come to make peace. My stomach fluttered unpleasantly, and I found that I could not speak.
Then I was struck with horror as her smile changed to a hideous and deadly sneer. Before I could react, she pulled forth from the folds of her dress a long, thin blade and pounced upon me.
By some miracle of the Gods, I caught her descending wrist and pulled it to one side. I had not noticed before just how much larger I was than she. My hand encircled her scrawny little wrist, but between my continuing weakness from not eating and sleeping and her fury to see me dead, I could not force her to drop the poignard she held over me. I saw that the tip was encrusted in some kind of yellow dirt but spared no time to wonder at that. As she pushed me backwards, the chair tipped and I had finally the good sense to scream.
As I fell I knew that I had to make sure above all else that I did not let go of her wrist, lest it give her the mere second she needed to plunge her blade into me. She dropped herself upon me and tried to force the tip of the poignard back towards my throat as I screamed again.
All of a sudden she was flying upwards away from me. I saw Jarik, his hands roughly about the horrible woman’s waist, pick her up and throw her clear across the room. I heard a brutal thud as she landed against the wall.
“Aenna!” cried a voice above me. Kurit was there, a look of absolute horror upon his face. He embraced me quickly, shielding me with his arms. I was so stunned from what had happened that I could not speak, and it took me a moment to realize that I had stopped breathing. When the next breath came, it carried with it an involuntary noise of alarm.
“It’s all right, Aenna,” Kurit said as he tried to lift me to my feet. I staggered and stumbled, still in shock. In fact, I do not recall by what power I did finally manage to stand—only that I found myself upright and leaning against my husband.
“Mother, by the Gods, what have you done?” Kurit cried in anguish, looking at the vile woman as she tried to regain her own breath and stand.
I looked to Jarik. He held the poignard in his hand, his other hand a fist. He stared at Kasha in obvious loathing, and I thought that he might at any moment lunge forward and plunge the blade into her skull.
There came a pounding at the bolted outer door and calls asking if all was well.
“Unlock the door and let the guards in,” Kurit said to Jarik. “And give me the blade.” Jarik handed the poignard to Kurit and went towards the outer door. “The guards shall escort you away, Mother. I do not wish to see your face ever again,” he growled, though I could see that he was close to tears of fear and sadness for what had almost occurred.
A guard entered the room from Kurit’s workroom, his sword drawn. As I watched him enter, everything seemed to slow in time with a low hum, just it had when I had spied the man with the crossbow at Endren’s gate when my new love had first brought me to his city.
Kurit turned to speak to the guard, still holding his mother’s poignard. I turned to see Kasha rising from the floor and pushing herself away from the wall behind her with both arms. She glanced at Jarik, who was facing the door he had just opened. Then she looked to Kurit, who was handing the blade over to the guard. I watched, unable to make a sound, as she leapt forth and snatched the weapon out of Kurit’s open hand.
I think Kurit made some kind of cry of alarm, because Jarik spun around to look at the scene. He leapt across the room towards me, but I saw Kasha’s blade coming down and knew he would be too late. I stumbled backwards out of her way, but my legs felt water-logged and did not move quickly enough. My eyes became transfixed on the blade as it moved towards my chest.
Then I was moving to the side. I felt Jarik’s hands on me, pulling me out of the way of Kasha’s strike. The jarring effect brought time and sound back to normal, and I heard myself scream as the mother of my husband plunged her poignard into my left shoulder, almost in the same place where the bolt meant for Kurit had buried itself.
Kurit was there, shoving his mother away from me. As he did so, she pulled her blade out of me, which hurt a great deal worse than it had going in. I felt myself fall against Jarik as Kurit furiously bellowed a hateful cry at Kasha and knocked her down.
She sat on the ground, the poignard still in her hand, and cried, “I did this for you, my beloved son, that you might be free of her evil grasp!” Then she closed her eyes, held the dagger in both hands, and plunged it into her own breast.
Blood sprayed from her self-inflicted wood, and she began to twitch. I buried my face in Jarik’s shoulder when she began to cough and gag on the blood that filled her lungs and throat as she died. I could not bear to watch the revolting scene.
I heard Jarik bellow for someone to fetch Tash. Then there were other hands on my back, and I heard Kurit say, “Come, Aenna, let’s get you out of here.”
I lifted my head from Jarik to look at Kurit, and a wave of nausea and dizziness overcame me. I think I began to fall, for when my eyes cleared a moment later, both men were holding me upright and speaking to me.
My chest felt odd, as if there were a great weight upon it. I gagged, though I had been turned away from Kasha’s gory corpse. A terrible fear seized me as I realized that something was very wrong. My fingers and toes felt as though they were on fire, but the rest of me shivered in cold.
“Something’s wrong,” I said, almost unable to speak. My throat was tight, and I found that I had to pant roughly just to get any air at all. I looked at Jarik and then at Kurit, stricken by terror, and tried to tell them again that something was wrong, but my throat closed itself entirely, and I found that my tongue had swelled so that it filled my mouth.
I tried frantically to breathe but could not. Kurit and Jarik eased me down to lie upon the floor, and I gripped their sleeves in panic. I struggled to breathe, to tell them I couldn’t breathe, but nothing worked. I saw thei
r eyes upon me in fear and lost consciousness as I heard them both calling my name frantically.
Chapter 24
I MUST SAY NOW that this chapter of my tale is written not from my own memories but entirely from things I have learned since my recovery. Of course, there is no suspense to be lost in admitting that I did, in time, recover, for clearly I could not have written the story you now read if I had not survived to do so.
Moments after I lost consciousness because my throat had closed, Tash ran into my workroom. He yelled at my two beloved men to back away from me quickly, and they did so. Then he began to cut a small hole low on my throat, and it took Kurit and two guards to hold Jarik back. Apparently, my good Champion was panicked and believed Tash to be murdering me.
What Tash did do was save my life by putting a glass dropper tube into my throat below the swelling so that my lungs could still take in air. It seemed this was the accepted practice for those who swelled as a result of bee stings. Once it became apparent that I was no longer in immediate danger of suffocation, Jarik stopped trying to attack Tash.
Kurit ordered guards to take his mother’s body away. He declared that she could still be buried alongside her husband in the royal crypt outside of Endren but gave the order that there would not be any official period of mourning for her, nor a funeral, nor a procession. He told everyone present that her crime of attempted regicide would cost her any reverence that might have otherwise been due.
As Kurit spoke, Tash washed my wound to try to clear out any remaining poison that had yet not been worked into my system. The wound itself was not very bad, though of course I was weakened by the blood loss. I was taken to my chambers and placed in my own bed. Tash had someone find a wider tube for my throat to allow me to breathe more easily, and the open end was covered with a light gauze to prevent me from inhaling anything but air.
Sorrows of Adoration Page 49
