Ruc snorted—a sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt a man makes when you punch him in the stomach—then rolled off of me.
Not like that, I wanted to say. It’s my own weight I don’t want. But he was already gone, sitting in the doorway, staring at the rain as he took a long pull on the jug of quey, then another, then another. I sat up, retrieved my knife, then joined him, still searching for the words. The storm had slackened, and I could see Ela on the raft across the way. Most of the Vuo Ton had taken shelter, retreating to their own huts or the wide octagonal halls ringing the settlement, but a dozen men and women flouted the downpour, dancing to the thudding drums. Ela was at the center of the motion, rain streaming down her face, slicking her skin as she spun from one partner to another.
“I want to be like her.”
I didn’t realize the words were true until I said them.
“She seems insane,” Ruc replied.
I shook my head. “She knows who she is. She understands what she wants. Nothing bothers her.”
“It ought to.”
“What ought to?”
Ruc took another long pull from the crock, handed it back, then waved a hand toward the rain. “Take your pick. The world is broken. Anyone who doesn’t know that, who doesn’t feel it right down in their bones, has to be broken, too.”
“What if we’re all broken?”
He chuckled grimly. “It’s a possibility I’ve considered.”
I reached over, ran a finger along the wound carved into his arm, then reached up to touch the scar on his chin.
“So what do we do?”
He shook his head. “Try to be better.”
The rain picked up again, driving into the rushes, slicing silver knives across the lamplight, spattering through the open door to wet my feet, my legs. I could hear the last dancers still out there, but couldn’t make out much more than shape and motion. When I turned to look at Ruc, my vision lurched. Lamplight glinted in his eyes, on the sweat beading his chest. For the rest, he was a man built out of heat, hard planes, and darkness.
“To be better,” I said, testing the words. I took his face in my hands. “That’s why I came back.”
For once, then, something that wasn’t a lie.
He touched my fingers, as though surprised to find them there, followed my bare arm back to my shoulder, his touch shockingly gentle. I could remember fighting him, fucking him, but nothing like this.
“You should have found somewhere else,” he said, easing me back onto the rushes, shifting his body over me. “Someone else.”
I reached down to fumble with his belt, yanked it free, slid a hand inside his pants to find him hard, ready.
“There is no one else,” I said, sliding his pants down, then kicking them off his ankles with my foot. I raised my arms for him to strip away my vest. “It had to be you.”
And of course, like most men, like most people, he heard the wrong thing. He heard the last word—you—when he should have been asking about the first, What is it?
21
I woke to find dawn’s light smeared like wax across the eastern sky. My head throbbed, and my body ached in a dozen places where the crocodile had battered me the day before. I rolled over groggily to find Ruc lying naked on his back, one arm tossed across the rushes, the other, the one with the wound, cradled at his chest as though he were trying to hold close something vitally important. I watched him for a while, his wide chest rising and falling, the twitching of his closed lids as he lived some dream I would never see. Then I turned away, searching for my knives.
I found them by the basket just inside the door, though I didn’t remember taking them off or placing them there. Whole portions of the night, in fact, seemed vague or missing altogether. I could remember Ruc’s lips against mine, his fingers tracing wonderful arcane shapes over my skin, his fingers inside me, his tongue between my legs—but those memories were lightning flashes—too bright, almost vicious in their precision—separated by long, dark blanks.
I straightened, worked the kinks from my legs and back, then bent over to strap a knife to each thigh. The weight felt good, right. Those knives were a reminder that, no matter how much I wanted my legs bare for Ruc’s hands to explore, I was here for a purpose. I wasn’t wearing the knives for self-defense or ornament. They were my instruments, just as I was Ananshael’s. If I could find love in the darkness of my heart, dredge it up—strong, gleaming, writhing—into the light, those knives would be the tools with which I finished it.
I glanced back at Ruc, tried to imagine driving a blade between his ribs, forcing it past the muscle into his heart. Something inside me quailed. I stopped, half turned in the light of the doorway, naked save for the blades at my legs, trying to understand what had just happened in my mind, to chase after that fleeing emotion, haul it back out, pin it down, look at it. It had been a long time, a very long time, since death had troubled me, and yet, for just a moment, the vision of that knife parting the flesh, of the hot blood pouring forth—it made me queasy.
I watched the pulse rise and fall at Ruc’s neck, traced the hard lines of his body with my eyes.
Is this love? I wondered. Could that sickness in my gut be love?
It seemed unlikely, but that’s the trouble. Love is not like the things of the world—trees, sky, fire—to which you can point and affix a name. Strangers from different lands speaking different languages can teach thousands of words with no more effort than the breath spent to say them. This is a flower. This is my hand. That is the moon. Love, however, gives nothing to point to. All we have are a woman’s words, her actions, the way she holds herself, the things she does or does not do. For most people, millions scattered the world over, love is the opposite of burying a knife inside a chest. To hear them tell it, Skullsworn are incapable of love. Ela, of course, disagreed, but who was I to say if they were right, if she was? I couldn’t see inside their heads. I could barely make out what was going on inside my own.
Irritated, and vexed with my own irritation, I turned away from Ruc, pulled on my pants and vest, stepped out the door, and froze.
Everything was gone.