by Megan Bannen
“Thank the Father we’re miles from where anyone can hear you,” I comment when he finishes the verse, but this only has the effect of encouraging him rather than deterring him. Now the widow and her daughters-in-law and grandchildren are clapping along, egging him on. I share an annoyed pursing of lips with the men.
Tavik lifts the kitchen utensils into the air and begins to dance on his knees, ticking the spoon and the ladle to the rhythm of his rocking shoulders and gyrating hips. He closes his eyes and sings another verse, loudly and badly, an overwrought metaphor comparing a woman to an inventory of precious stones.
“The lyrics are dreadful,” I inform Hroth, and he snorts appreciatively. But Tavik keeps singing, his eyes shut tight. I wonder if he is escaping the world around him at this moment, imagining himself back in Kantar, dancing with his friends in some mosaic-lined hall. And there are girls there, too, I’m certain. I can easily imagine Tavik, crooning in the center of them, surrounded by an amorphous group of sensuous femininity. When he opens his eyes, how disappointed he must be to find my irritated face staring back at him. The thought that he might not like the sight of my face at all plucks an out-of-tune string in my chest.
“Contain yourself,” he says, hitting the pot lightly with the wooden spoon. “I know you may never have seen such a manly display of singing and dancing before in your sheltered life. It’s all right if you need to swoon from the intensity of my talent and beauty.”
It needles me, the way he inhabits his own skin, how he navigates the physical world without any thought of others’ judgment, especially when my own body feels weak and used up.
“You are so . . . ,” I huff.
“Gifted?” he offers. “Dazzling? Glorious?” He raises first one eyebrow and then the other. I’m irked with myself for grinning back at him, but how can anyone fail to mirror that smile? Before I can look away, he tosses the spoon and the ladle heedlessly behind him and begins to scoot across the floor toward me, moving as sinuously as a snake on his knees, his torso swaying in the air like a cobra poised to attack. Only he’s no snake. He’s more like a snake charmer, and as long as he holds my gaze, I’m the cobra. Our eyes are locked, and I can’t bring myself to look away. He dances closer and closer to me, sliding seductively forward on his knees, his eyes burning into mine as he sings.
What is better?
The capture or the chase?
You are the huntress
And I the prey.
I want to tell him that the hunting metaphor of his stupid song is trite, but my mouth twists and won’t cooperate. He’s almost reached me, when Widow Bennik claps and hoots and draws his attention away from me. Tavik answers her gummy smile with a mischievous grin. He leaps to his feet, dances to the old woman, and holds out his hand. I guess the meaning is clear enough, because she says, “Don’t mind if I do.”
He doesn’t know any Rosvanian dances, so he lets her chatter at him, showing him first this step, then this turn, until he’s mastered a country dance with her, both of them giddy and giggling.
I hunch my shoulders, trying to read despite the frivolity thundering all around me, the whole household joining in the revelry. I hardly notice when the old woman plops herself down in the chair across from me again, winded.
Suddenly, Tavik’s bouncing on the balls of his feet beside my chair. “Come on, Gelya, dance with me.”
I ignore him.
“You know you want to,” he insists.
“I don’t know how to—” But I remember the girl I was in Hedenskia, twirling by the sea, my red hair fiery in the wind.
I remember.
“Aha! You do know how to dance!” Tavik cries, and before I know what’s hit me, he scoops me out of my chair by my waist and sets me down on my feet right in front of him, a display of physical strength that he plays off as effortless.
“Like this,” he directs me, showing me a quick series of movements, mostly broad gestures with the arms and hands while springing on the soles of his feet to the rhythm of the rain. “Now you try.”
I start to move, but I flounder, feeling like an idiot.
“With me,” he says, humming the song from the beginning and mirroring the movement in front of me so I can follow.
To dance is to love the body, so a Daughter is not supposed to dance. But I am no one’s daughter anymore, and an ebullient joy that is not Elath bubbles inside me as I sink into the rhythm, the music giving me a boost of energy I desperately need right now.
“Again!” Tavik cries, and I repeat the movement until I get it right. He adds to it, teaching me each step until I’ve mastered an entire string, and I’m starting to move more confidently, more smoothly.
“Now turn like this,” Tavik says in the beats between the verses, demonstrating for me. I follow along with each new direction until I have all the steps memorized for two verses and the refrain.
“Again!” Tavik laughs, and we run through it once more.
“Again!”
This time, when I start the sequence, Tavik unexpectedly steps behind me, so close I can feel the heat of his body along my back, and he whispers in my ear, “All things in balance.”
I gasp in surprise when his hands land on my waist, and when I turn this time, it’s because he’s spinning me out and then back into himself. My hand arching over my head meets his arching over his own head in the opposite direction. Every step along the way, his movements counterbalance mine, making it easier to work my way through the dance. I realize he’s taught me the female half, and now he’s stepping in to complete it with the male movements.
I start giggling uncontrollably. “Fun!” I whoop as the dance brings him sliding in front of me. “I should try it sometime!”
“Yes, you should!”
We break apart and come back together. He grasps my hand and spins me out and then back into him. We’re about to risk life and limb to get past the Great Wall of Saint Balzos and cross through the Dead Forest, and I have never been happier in my life than I am at this moment, dancing with Tavik in a smugglers’ house.
Each time we turn in to each other, there’s an instant, not even the length of a breath, when we face each other. Out and in, out and in. At first, he makes a ridiculous face at me each time it happens, and I burst out laughing. But eventually his clownish antics dissolve into a grin, and my smile back to him is so warm I feel like I’m glowing.
The next time I spin into Tavik, his eyes lock with mine, and my heart flutters like a bird’s wings in my chest, and heat rises in my cheeks, and neither one of us is smiling now.
The next time I spin into him, his hand pulls me in closer than before, my hip pressed to his, and I watch, hypnotized, as his gaze moves from my eyes to my lips.
Time slows to a halt, a window half open. In this unending sliver of a second, I remember the way he froze when I pulled back the veil on our fake wedding day. What did he see when he looked on my face? Something hideous?
Something lovely?
The sliver stretches and thins. In my mind, I lean into my groom, who is not really mine at all, and he closes the distance between us to touch his lips to my lips. It’s nothing like the way he kissed Mera. It’s only the smallest shift of one mouth softening against another.
The window of time slams shut, and when Tavik spins me out, my exhaustion catches up to me. My grip isn’t tight enough to hold on, and I turn with too much momentum, sending myself stumbling across the room. I bump hard into the table, knocking the book of verse to the floor with a percussion as loud as thunder.
I didn’t realize until this moment that the entire Bennik family had stopped their own revelry to watch Tavik and I dance. “It’s getting hot in here,” Hroth’s wife teases us, and I feel my already-flushed face go mortifyingly scarlet.
“Are you all right?” Tavik asks me breathlessly. I can’t look at his face. I’m not sure how I’m ever going to look at that face again.
“Fine,” I tell the floor.
I get through dinner
without meeting his eyes and excuse myself to an early bedtime. The problem with this escape plan is that since the house is one room, I have to tuck myself into a dark corner while everyone else except the children is still awake. My body is limp with fatigue, but sleep refuses to come. With my eyes shut tight, my mind has the blackened canvas it needs to paint its own picture of Tavik’s face each time I turned in to him. The rain still drips into the pots, and as far as my restless mind is concerned, Tavik is still dancing.
Back at the convent, I always believed that my Hedenski past posed the greatest threat to my soul, but now I understand the true reason why Vessels are cloistered. No matter how tightly I close my eyes, I can’t escape the warmth of Tavik’s hands on my waist, his body dancing so close to mine that parts of him brush up against parts of me, jolting me with shock waves everywhere we touch, anchoring me to the pleasures of the physical world.
Tavik.
Liquid and lovely.
He is dancing across the floor to me, sliding on his knees, coming for me.
For me.
His eyes simmer from behind the thick fringe of his eyelashes as he inches closer, and I don’t know what I’ll do if and when he reaches me at last.
It doesn’t feel like a sin to find out.
I stand on a precipice overlooking a river, wearing my bridal dress, the veil pulled back, my face uncovered. Trees expand across the horizon as far as the eye can see on the other side, but while I’m certain Zofia-who-is-Elath waits somewhere close by, I don’t see her.
“Hey!” someone calls out. I turn to find Tavik standing beside me, shirt off, scabbards strapped to his back, ready to pray. “I need some answers here!”
No one responds to him.
“I deserve some answers!” he shouts heatedly.
Silence. There’s only the rushing of the wind rustling in the trees, the buzzing of insect wings, the chirps of birds and frogs.
“Where are you?” he yells. He demands.
“I’m right next to you.”
He turns and seems surprised to find me at his side.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? What are you doing here? It’s my dream.”
I look in confusion across the river, but I see no one. “Are you sure?”
He looks across the river, too, and clicks his tongue. “I’m not sure about anything anymore. Not that I’d ever admit that to you.”
“You just did, though.”
“Yeah, but you’re not real.”
“None of this is real,” I muse.
“Just a dream,” he agrees.
Just a dream, a world where nothing matters and nothing comes with a cost. Suddenly unburdened, my body is light as air. I step in front of Tavik to stand between him and the river, and I let myself stare at him, as openly and obviously as I please, because none of it matters here.
“What are you doing?” he asks with a breathy laugh. I’m making the dream version of Tavik nervous, and it’s intoxicating.
“Just a dream,” I remind him or me or both of us as I hold out the finger of my right hand and press it to the bridge of his spectacular nose, slowly sliding down the perfect, crooked line of it.
“Gelya?” He sounds uncertain, but he doesn’t stop me.
My fingertip slides down to his lips to trace their soft lines, remembering how they felt pressed against my own for the barest of seconds. My gaze follows my finger, but from the corner of my eye, I see Tavik’s body go very still, the way my own does when I happen to find myself unexpectedly close to a rabbit in the convent garden and I don’t want to frighten it away.
It makes me braver.
With the fingers of both hands, I touch the place where his unruly hair meets the smooth skin of his forehead and let my fingers drift downward, following the lines of his face: his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his jaw.
I meet his eyes, asking for permission to keep going. He gapes at me, his eyes the color of moss on the oaks beyond the river. He nods.
I take his left hand in mine and stretch out his arm, brushing the silver bite marks a telleg made when he was six years old and trapped in a well. My eyes meet his again, and he is soft as lamb’s wool in my grasp. Beginning with the tattoo of the Grace Tree of Kantar on his wrist, I stroke my way up his arm, feeling the texture of him, the skin, the scars, the tendons and muscles beneath the surface, all the way to his shoulder. He watches me, mesmerized, unmoving as a statue. His body, in all its hard and soft solidity, sings its own song beneath my hands. I run my fingers across his collarbones, careful to avoid my handprint over his heart. Then I feel my way downward, moving my touch over the unfamiliar roughness of his chest, the ridges of his ribs, the corrugation of his stomach.
He makes a noise, a quick release of air from his lungs, and when I look into his face this time, his pupils are huge and black and bottomless. Something about it makes me giddy, and I reach behind him to draw both his swords from their scabbards. They’re heavy, but I’m strong enough to hold them up before Tavik’s glazy stare.
“I thought you said it would be difficult to disarm you,” I tell him, triumphant.
He closes his eyes. His forehead creases as if he were in pain. “Oh, Tavik,” he says. “This is very bad, and very, very wrong.” But when he opens his eyes, he is no longer still. He is heat and life and movement. His hands reach for my waist, hot through the fabric of my wedding dress.
And then he’s gone—just gone—and even his swords have disappeared from my hands.
I wake to Widow Bennik singing, “Rise and shine. The messenger is back.”
She stands by the table, holding a soulswift in her knobby-knuckled hand. I will never get used to the sight of that.
“What does it say?” Tavik asks, flinging off his blanket.
The dance. The dream. Tavik. Thank the Father above the Prima’s message has arrived, something—anything—to get me back on track and thinking about the more important issues at hand. Feeling a little more solid than I did yesterday, I rise from my pallet and join them at the table.
Hroth decants the paper from the canister around the bird’s leg, gives it to his mother, then takes the soulswift from her hand. As Widow Bennik reads the message, her face creases in astonishment.
“What?” Tavik and Hroth ask at the same time but in two different languages.
She holds up the tiny slip of paper. “I’d think your Prima had accidentally added an extra zero to that sum of money if what she requested wasn’t the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. She damn well better pay me this much if she expects me to pull it off.”
“What did she say?” I ask.
“She asked me to smuggle you over the Great Wall of Saint Balzos. You two got a death wish or something?”
“May I read it, please?” Tavik asks in Rosvanian.
“Go ahead. There’s a part there that must be for you, because I sure as death can’t read it.”
Tavik slides the paper out from between her fingers, holds it in the palm of his hand, and scans the symbols no one but he can read. The way he cups the note reminds me once again of the statue of the unknown saint in the convent’s parlertorium, holding his own heart in his hands.
“What did you write to the Prima?” I ask, still feeling shy of him, my embarrassing dream floating between us.
He keeps his eyes on the message when he answers, simply, “The truth.”
“Hey, Hroth,” Widow Bennik calls to her eldest, slicing through the moment with her gruff voice. “We still got that Yilish gunpowder?”
Yil’s gunpowder is the reason why the Holy Ovinist Church keeps a careful truce with the empire. It’s highly illegal in Ovinist countries and very dangerous, and the fact that we’re taking any amount of it to the Great Wall of Saint Balzos fills me with grave concern.
Hroth eyes his mother warily. “Yeah, we were going to make a king’s ransom off it, weren’t we?”
“Just did, thanks t
o the Prima of Kantar. Pack it up, sweetheart.”
Forty
The shipment of Aurian wool that was supposed to smuggle Tavik and me to Yil is now a shipment of Yilish silk smuggling us to Varos da Balzos by way of the Fev River. We’ve swapped our knights’ uniforms for simple men’s clothing, so we are no longer Brother Remur and Brother Elgar, Knights of the Order, but Remur and Elgar, a pair of smugglers on Captain Hroth’s crew.
The farther north we travel, the colder it gets. We’re bundled in fur-lined leather jackets and caps, but the chill bites me to the bone anyway, one more way my body’s continued frailty drags on me.
While I may be dressed as a man, the disguise does me little good. I don’t know how I’ve changed since leaving the convent, but I don’t seem to be fooling anyone these days. The one and only woman on the crew, other than myself, tried to give me her extra shiv a few days ago, and when I declined, she said, “Suit yourself, just so long as you know the world ain’t kind to girls.” Now all I can think about is Zofia’s warning that the world of men is dangerous for women, a point she proved just a few hours after she said it.
The crew hides us inside two ingeniously devised bolts of fabric at various checkpoints along the Fev, which is an absolute nightmare for poor Tavik, who might actually prefer death to being stuck in a tight space. The constant fear of getting caught never goes away, but it’s a less pernicious presence than the constant buzzing and churning and roiling of Elath’s relentless spirit inside me, growing louder with each passing day.
I’d confide this to Tavik, but we don’t talk much. I’m stupidly shy with him, although I don’t know why. It’s not like he can pry open my brain and find the embarrassing dream I had or know how my heart fluttered just because he danced with me. I’m not Mera. I’m just me, and now, all of a sudden, I don’t know how to be me around him anymore.