Did I? That feeling inside, like warm sunshine on my face, but radiating from within, swelled and burst. “Harlan saved my life,” I said, and I could hear the change in my voice. “He helped me when no one else would. He sacrificed everything for me.”
Ochieng was nodding still. “Of course you love him.”
“I barely knew him. When he was a baby and then for only a few days when we met again.”
“Love isn’t bound by time.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
He stroked his thumbs over the backs of my hands. “I think you do. You just need to be safe and quiet for a while, to find yourself again. Tell me something—do you like me at all? Care for me, even a little bit?”
Of course I did. Ochieng had also saved me. Perhaps I was like a pet cat, hiding from those who kicked at me, snuggling up to those who fed and petted me. As simple as that. Ochieng had begun to frown at my silence.
I reached up and smoothed my fingers over his cheekbone, then over his brow, testing the texture of his skin and the bones beneath. He smiled a little. Curious, and also enjoying the touch.
“I like you, Ochieng,” I said softly, and you would’ve thought I’d said he was the greatest man anywhere, the way his hesitant smile bloomed. “But because I like you, I think you deserve a better woman than me.”
“How about you let me decide what I deserve?”
“What kind of friend would I be to you then? Ayela thinks she deserves all the sweets she can stuff in her mouth, but that’s not good for her,” I teased.
He didn’t laugh at that. Quite the opposite, he went very stern. “Ayela is a child. I am not a child.” Something in the gruff way he said that stirred me.
“No,” I replied slowly. “You are a man.” And had I really thought of him as a man? He was so different from Dasnarian men. That had made it easy for me to be his friend, because he didn’t always come across to me like the men I’d known. With his laughing, smiling, relaxed ways, I found he didn’t frighten me as just seeing the Dasnarian soldiers had, much less Rodolf himself.
Experimenting, I dropped my hand to his shoulder, tracing the muscled lines beneath his soft shirt. He held very still, letting me explore. I tried to imagine his strong body against mine, pressing inside me…and went cold. I dropped my hand, shaking my head to dispel the chill.
“I still don’t know that I can ever be your wife in truth.”
“Then be my wife in every other way.”
I lifted my gaze to his, incredulous, but he looked utterly serious. He nodded at me. “I mean it. If you feel you can’t stay unless you’re my wife, then let’s please the family and marry at the festival of kuachamvua. We can make our addition and share a room, but the rest can wait until you’re ready.”
“If I’m ever ready.”
“If you’re ever ready. We can live like brother and sister—but without the name-calling.” He grinned at me and I smiled back, hesitant.
“Your mother will expect babies,” I pointed out. “Living like brother and sister will not make babies.”
“Even my mother acknowledges that there are powers of nature beyond her control. Not every couple makes children, and certainly not right away.”
Children. The idea blazed through me. I might have a child, a mix of Ochieng and me. How might they look? I suddenly desperately wanted to know. “If I became your wife, you would have the right to my body, no matter what I wished,” I said. That might be a solution, for him to simply plant his seed in me and ignore however I might scream or weep.
Ochieng took me by the shoulders, his grip fierce. “I want you to look at me and hear this, Ivariel.” He waited for me to meet his gaze. “I will never touch you in that way unless you ask me to. I swear until the end of time.”
I pressed my lips together, determined not to cry again. “I thought you said love isn’t bound to time.”
“Exactly.” He smiled. Ochieng’s “exactly,” a kind of celebration of exactitude and serendipity combined.
“What’s involved in this ceremony?” I needed to know if I could even make it through that.
“Very simple,” he assured me. “In the family, building the room is the most important step. At the festival, we dress up. We promise to love and honor each other. Everybody sings.” He laughed at my smile. “Of course. And then we dance. You’ll like that part.”
“No ring—no wedding bracelets?”
“No, my love.” He caressed my cheek and I surprised myself by leaning into his palm. “We do not shackle each other. Only promises, nothing more.”
Only promises. I could maybe do that.
“And, if you decide you don’t like being married to me, you can always dissolve the marriage and leave.”
That surprised me enough to have me lifting my head. “How’s that?”
He shrugged a little. “Most married couples renew their vows to each other every morning—or every evening, depending on their personal custom. It’s a way of committing to being there, in the marriage together. You can always decide not to renew.”
“Or you. If you decide I’m entirely too crazy, you could decide not to recommit.”
“True.” He nodded gravely. “Though you should not hope too hard for that, as I’m highly unlikely to ever walk away from you.”
Hope. A funny thing, that. I’d realized early on—back in those first dark days on the Valeria—that I didn’t know how to hope for something for myself, that I’d have to practice, starting with small, simple hopes, and work my way up to wanting a direction for my life. Perhaps I could choose this. Try it on, like I’d tried to be a Warrior and Priestess of Danu.
“All right,” I said. Then had to take a deep breath, my chest tight with both hope and dread, intertwined like a flowering vine creeping through a lattice of marble. “After all, I managed to be a pretend Priestess of Danu, why not be a fraud of a wife, too?”
He laughed, too pleased with me to be insulted. Or to heed that warning.
~ 12 ~
Ochieng worked some sort of magic whereby he informed his family that we would marry at the festival, but that I was shy on the topic and did not care to be congratulated—or even discuss it much. They mostly restrained themselves, giving me beaming and knowing smiles. Even the children refrained from saying anything, although they visibly shimmered with excitement and began calling me Mem Ivariel.
They did not, however, restrain their questions about learning the martial forms I’d begun to teach them before my injuries. With the cleanup work more or less under control—and everyone thinking about the possibility of attack—the parents asked me to resume lessons. The children met me on the terrace, my original five students, plus three more.
I tried to get away with simply teaching them the dance steps, to build strength and agility, to imprint the patterns of movement on their bodies, but they would have none of it.
“Why can’t we work with the pretend weapons we earned?” Femi wanted to know. “Ayela did before.”
True, and that had perhaps been a mistake on my part. The ducerse is a strenuous dance, which is why Kaja picked it as the primary one to adapt to my martial training, one that demands strength, balance, fluidity, and knowing where your hands are at all times. This is more difficult than it sounds. When I learned the ducerse, I practiced with round beads on my palms. With the fingers pulled back and the hand flat, only the dancer’s balance and awareness keeps the beads from falling as she moves. Once I could do the entire dance at speed, my mother rewarded me with the two perfect pearls I danced with from then on.
Until I gave them to Rodolf as a wedding gift, but that didn’t bear thinking about.
When Kaja adapted the dance, she’d said I could do it almost exactly the same as I’d always done, but with knives in my hands instead of balanced pearls. She’d argued that the dance was perfectly suite
d to attack and defense, and even theorized it had once served that purpose. I couldn’t imagine a time or a world where women would have trained in the ducerse to fight rather than to refine their beauty in the seraglio, so I’d laughed at her.
Having seen much more of the world since, I began to wonder if she hadn’t been correct.
Still, the most difficult part for me to learn had been to hold the blade in a closed hand, especially when it met resistance. I’d trained so diligently and for so long to keep my palms open and upraised, that my instincts had been to relax my hands.
So, when young Ayela, perhaps even better than I’d been at her age, especially considering she’d just learned the dance, had made it all the way through at speed without dropping a bead—the first of my students to do so—I’d presented her with a blunted metal dagger Ochieng had helped me craft from a kitchen knife.
The first thing my students did that morning when we resumed classes was demonstrate that all of them—even the three new ones—could do the ducerse without dropping a bead. They’d practiced all the rainy season, teaching each other. Yes, they needed some refinement, particularly leg work to deepen the knee bends, and to increase tempo. And I’d never tried to teach any of them the aspect of the dance where you wear bells and keep them utterly silent until you allow them to chime, building to a crescendo of sound. Still, they’d met the standard and deserved a reward.
Ayela even had her child’s weapon thrust through a leather belt, one that looked very like my own sword belt, hidden away in my things. The D’tiembos must’ve retrieved that, too, because Rodolf had taken it from me, had taken all my weapons but one. Kaja’s knife she’d had sent to me upon her death, asking me to plant it where it belonged. Had they left it in him? And how had they found my weapons among all those the Dasnarians had brought? I felt sure they had, because they’d been cleaned and laid out for me—before I hid them away.
“All right,” I conceded. “I will see to getting you all blunted weapons.”
“And real ones?” Ayela asked, a bloodthirsty glint in her lovely brown eyes.
“We will see,” I replied. “First you all must build leg strength. No maybe bending knees. All of you practice together, going deep as you can. Like this.” I showed them, beyond relieved that my old muscle habits responded, allowing me to skim through the deep, long lunges and rise again with grace. They needn’t know how my knees and thighs screamed in protest.
I had practice to do, too.
“May we sing?” One of the other girls asked. “Like we did when you danced during the rains?”
Why not? “Yes. But put most of your attention on strength, precision and speed, not on making pretty songs.” I frowned sternly at them, much as Kaja had done to me. But they were not so easily intimidated as I had been, and sang out happy agreements.
As I hoped, Ochieng had not yet left the house, still scavenging for breakfast in the outdoor kitchen. I suspected he might not be an early riser, and it struck me that I’d discover this soon enough. Sharing a room. With a man. I couldn’t even imagine.
Though I could recall how Princessa Adaladja had looked when she said she missed sleeping with “her Freddy.” Perhaps it would be pleasurable. A happy thought.
“Good morning, lovely Ivariel.” Ochieng picked up my hand, kissing the backs of my fingers with extravagant finesse, as some did in the Twelve Kingdoms—and making me laugh. “What is that smile for?”
“You and your silly games.”
“Ah, but you were smiling when you walked up, thus inspiring my demonstration of affection. Laugh at me if you must.” He put a hand over his heart dramatically. Palesa threw a fruit at him, but he caught it, grinning at her and biting into it with relish.
“I wondered if you could help me find and blunt more practice blades for my students,” I said. “Like we did for Ayela.” Months and forever ago. I remembered the elaborate pantomime I’d gone through, indicating what I wanted without speaking, Ochieng watching me with intense attention.
He remembered, too, because his smile took on a certain intimacy. “Of course. Come with me.”
He led me to one of the store rooms bordering first room, finding a chest there. It was filled with daggers of varying sizes, all fine weapons to my inexperienced eye. “A shame to blunt these,” he commented, “but you could select some now for when you move them into using edged weapons.”
“I don’t know that I will,” I demurred.
He cast me an opaque glance over his shoulder. “Not to sound like Desta—and if you repeat me to him, I’ll find a way to take revenge—but conflict is coming. If not this season, then next. These children you teach will need to wield edged weapons, if they are to protect what’s precious to them, what’s precious to us all. I think you understand this.”
I did, but I didn’t like it. With a sigh I began sorting through the contents, picking out daggers of varying lengths so the children could try them. I tried not to touch them, to let their hilts slide into my grip where they might feel entirely too familiar.
“Just keep the whole chest,” Ochieng said. “Everyone else has their own weapons. Here, these might do for blunting. Some are beyond sharpening, so can be adapted readily.” He slid them into a sack, then returned to looking for more.
“Ochieng?”
“Yes, my love?”
It warmed me that he’d taken to calling me that, as if he might make me believe it if he repeated it often enough. It might be working. “How did you find my weapons amid all the others, when you rescued me from the Dasnarians?”
“I didn’t so much. Once I found where you’d dropped, I bandaged you to stop the major bleeding and took you to the healer. The others who stayed to make sure all of the intruders were dead went around and collected all of the armor and weapons, before they scattered the naked bodies for the scavengers. Here, that should be plenty.”
I found it faintly horrifying to hear my easygoing Ochieng so matter-of-factly discussing feeding the bodies of my erstwhile countrymen to the wild animals. But then—he hadn’t told me until I asked.
“Once you were sleeping and we’d all recovered,” he continued, rising from his crouch, “I sorted through everything they’d brought back and found your personal weapons. They were easy to differentiate from the rest. I cleaned them up and set them aside for you. Why, are you missing something?”
Completely bemused, I couldn’t decide what to ask first. “You brought back all the weapons and armor?”
“Excellent metal. We weren’t going to leave it for the oasis ruffians to capitalize on.”
“And then scattered the bodies.”
“We wanted to be sure that if anyone did search for them, there wouldn’t be much to find. And the animals need to eat, too.” He flashed me a grin, an edge to it that reminded me of the bloodthirsty glint in Ayela’s eyes. How had I missed this side of them before? He sobered, searching my face. “Isn’t that what you wanted—to have them effectively disappear, victims of hubris and the rainy season?”’
“Yes,” I replied, which I had, but the details somehow made it that much more brutal. I shouldn’t feel sorry for them—many of those men killed by my own hand—but for a Dasnarian man to be fed to the wild animals, devoid of his armor and weapons… Unthinkable. “What of Kaja’s blade? I don’t recall seeing that.”
“Ah.” He looked thoughtful. “That—we left where you planted it, as your mentor wished. It seemed…” His dark gaze stayed steady on mine, careful of my reaction. “Sacred, in a way. Important to leave there. We buried him like that, so the blade would forever pin him to his unmarked grave. Then we salted the earth and had the elephants trample it flat, the dirt packed so tightly it would not erode in the rains.”
The small hairs on my neck pricked. A lethal edge to this man I thought I’d known. “Do you believe the dead can rise from their graves?” I asked him.
&nbs
p; Instead of laughing that off, he pursed his lips. “Whether I believe such a thing or not, I would take far greater steps to ensure that monster never again walks this earth.”
He said it so evenly, so without inflection, that I knew great emotion lay beneath his words.
“Thank you,” I whispered, wishing I could say more.
Relaxing slightly, he moved close to me, touching my cheek in a light caress. When I didn’t jump away, when I leaned into him, he wrapped his arms around me in a gentle embrace. “I would’ve gladly killed him for you. I sometimes have dreams of doing so.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
A dark laugh fluttered in his chest under my ear. “So you could have the satisfaction.”
“No.” No matter that I’d wanted Rodolf’s death, I hadn’t wanted to deal it. “So you can be free of this.”
“I won’t ever be. I don’t want to be. It’s part of who you are, thus also mine.”
Leaning against him in the quiet shadows of the storeroom, his heart thudding under my ear, I smiled at the way his words sounded like a vow.
“Do you want the blade back?” he asked into my silence. “I can find the grave and the elephants will help me dig.”
Gruesome to imagine. “No. I think you did right to leave it there. Kaja would’ve liked that.”
He ran a hand over my hair, feathering his fingers through it. “Good.”
“Besides, the elephants have better things to do than dig up what’s best left buried.”
Setting me away from him a little, he smiled at me, looking for my meaning. “Shall we begin carving our poles?”
“Yes. This afternoon?”
“Yes.” He brushed a kiss on my forehead, and I closed my eyes to savor the sweetness of it. Rodolf lay moldering in an unmarked grave, Kaja’s blade forever through his heart, and I lived. Better, I thrived, a strong and kind man’s lips on my brow, his breath warm on my skin. I stayed still for it. Ever so gently, Ochieng placed kisses on my eyelids, making me breathe a sigh, then on either cheek. Wanting more, I tipped up my mouth, to receive his kiss there, too.
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