“Sladec sends his regards,” Machrus answered, giving the soup a stir with his spoon. She should have known he would be quick to fulfil her request and ask about going to see her people, but she was nervous for Sladec’s response. “He hopes you were pleased with yesterday.”
Was that in doubt? “I hope you assured him that I was.” Renna picked at her own meal, feeling strangely ill at ease. It was simply a meal with her husband—with her friend, and there was no need for dramatics.
She felt him staring at her, though she could not quite meet his eye. “From your statement last night, I believed you were, but you have been most strange today.”
Renna shifted uncomfortably. “I trust you didn’t tell him that.” The idea of him informing his brother of her strange behaviour made everything worse—especially if Sladec guessed the cause.
“No,” Machrus confirmed, still watching her steadily. “I said that spending time with our family made you want to go home.”
Renna choked on her soup, spluttering and coughing. Machrus half-rose from his chair, appearing quite alarmed as she fought for air, her hand pressed against her chest as she regained her ability to speak. “You phrased it that way?”
He settled back, giving her a wary stare as if waiting for her to embarrass herself again. “Did you not employ honesty with your Desmond?”
Renna took a sip of her water. “Well, yes, but... I also chose my wording carefully!”
Machrus was obviously unconcerned. “He understood.” She was not the least bit convinced, and he rolled his eyes. “With additional explanation, he understood.”
Better.
“So... what happens now?”
“He is considering that matter,” Machrus replied, taking another hearty bite. Even with her annoyance at his delivery, she still preened a little that he so clearly enjoyed something she’d made. “He is uncertain if a party would be willing to come at this time. Evidently they are quite occupied with building.”
“Oh,” she muttered, unable to fully hide her sudden despondency. She’d try to tell Machrus that. They may care about her in a general way, but they were not the same as family. She had served her purpose, had been the currency to secure them rights to the land they now worked, but that did not mean they would drop everything to come see her when homesickness struck.
It should hearten her, if she wasn’t so selfish. They were working, building, hopefully thriving, just as Desmond had always hoped they would. And she shouldn’t sulk just because their priorities were with the whole of the group, and not with her.
But she very much wished to brood. Maybe that would keep some of her other emotions at bay.
“Does that mean I may go to them?”
Machrus was looking down at his food. “As I said, he is... considering it. My brother is fond of maintaining traditions, but at times he can be made to see reason.”
Renna sighed, the desolate feeling spreading a little further. “Thank you for trying,” she managed to say, and finding that she meant it. Other people might not do as she wished, but she truly valued Machrus’s willingness to make the attempt, even if it did not prove successful. “I don’t want you fighting with him about it, though,” she added. There was tension between him and Dundrel already because of her existence, and she didn’t want him at odds with more of his brothers for the same reason.
“What better reason could I find?” Machrus asked her, genuinely confused. “Than trying to ensure my wife receives something that she needs.”
He wasn’t being fair. Not at all. How was she to not react when he blessed her with these glimpses of his sweetness, his kindness, his thoughtfulness...
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” she whispered almost brokenly.
He looked at her perplexedly. “Why not? I only spoke truthfully. You are my wife, and it is my responsibility to see that you are cared for in the manner you require. Even if it means, on occasion, entering into a minor familial disagreement with my brother.”
She would have smiled if her muscles did not feel so incapable of the action. She loved the way he spoke, so formal, always so certain, while she often fumbled and hesitated. Even now, she found she could not answer him, not with anything she could pass for truthfulness.
“Renna?”
She blinked. “May I ask you to try something?”
She hadn’t meant to do this, but perhaps it would distract him, and she realised with a little jolt that she very much wanted to hear it. Just once, to see if it would feel like a taste of home, or if the word would sound foreign to her now—a remnant of a past from which she had already been absolved.
Machrus looked at her guardedly, but then gave a slow nod of his head. “You may.”
She twirled her spoon in the soup, but forced herself to put it down, to look at him, to not shy away. This was her own distraction, after all, and she would enjoy it if she could.
“Could you use my real name, once? It’s Hea-”
“I am aware of what it was,” Machrus cut in, his eyes narrowing at her. “Why do you ask me this?”
She shrugged, already feeling herself shrinking, whatever confidence and courage she possessed burrowing itself away all the tighter, all the more difficult to find the next time she needed it. “I just wanted to hear it. I... I miss it. I’m happy to be Renna, really,” now anyway. The process still seemed entirely unfair if she dwelt too long on it. “But when I was little, I always... I thought my husband would call me by my real name. Not something new.”
Machrus looked at her for a long while, considering maybe her, or something else entirely. She couldn’t imagine what consequences there would be, not when they were tucked away here in their home with no one else to hear them, to know what passed between them.
“Heather,” Machrus said at last, his voice curling around the word, somehow rough and gentle all at once. She shivered. “You are most peculiar.”
She managed a rueful smile. “Adelmar said that about the both of us, once. Or I suppose, how we are together.”
Machrus did not grimace as she’d expected, only continued to stare. “Adelmar might be the sanmira, but she is not infallible. I happen to know that of the two of us, you are the strange one.”
Renna gave him a dry look of her own. “And I suppose you are everything that is sensible.”
Machrus shifted back in his chair, daring to appear almost smug. “Quite.”
She shouldn’t want to laugh at him. He was being arrogant and insufferable—or at least, attempting to be—but somehow she found it all too amusing to take seriously. She pressed her lips together firmly, fearing that a few giggles might escape if she wasn’t careful, remembering that her laughter last night had led to her hugging him, and she couldn’t afford to make such mistakes.
The fear of doing so quelled her good humour as quickly as it had come.
Machrus must have noticed the shift in her temperament for he leaned forward again, no more hints of teasing as he regarded her. “Do you wonder why I would save your possessions, yet not utilise the name of your birth? At least when we are alone?”
Renna had not expected that. She had wondered, in her most petulant moments, but she was trying to embrace her new life, not dwell on the aspects that might still chafe if she thought on it too long. “Not really,” she confessed. “My things were more important to me, anyway. But... I still want to thank you for saying it at all.”
Machrus nodded in acknowledgement, still watching, still assessing. She wondered what he was looking for in her expression. “I wish to please you, in what ways I can,” he continued, laying his open hand upon the table. She stared at it, her initial impression that it was an invitation, but surely that was wrong—and she would feel so stupid resting her hand in his if he did not intend for her to place it there.
But then he was reaching, leaving no more room for uncertainty as he grasped one of her hands and tucked it neatly into his as he held it across the tabletop. She swallowed, the warmth just a
s strong today as it was last night, and she wondered what would make him want to hold her hand twice in so many days.
“Renna,” he persisted, obviously finding it important she understand his point. And though she had felt a thrill to hear him call her Heather, there was something comfortingly familiar about her new name as well—which was both odd and satisfying in equal measure. “Our brides are given new names to help commemorate what came before. It is the name they shared with their people, with their families, and to hear it used again during visits is something to be cherished.”
She blinked at him. “So... they’re still allowed to call me Heather?”
Machrus gave her one of his incredulous looks. “As if we could stop an entire people? You might find it strange to hear once more, and some prefer to go by their new names alone, but the option is yours.”
She glanced down at their entwined hands, still a little uncertain. “Then what’s the point of getting a new name at all?”
Machrus squeezed her hand, his eyes as soft as she had ever seen them. It did nothing to help her resolve, her heart fluttering, her insides filled with a pleasant warmth. “Because it is the first thing a husband gives to his wife. Something to be shared between them, and the people she would soon call her own. It is a daily reminder that, to him, she is a new creature. Someone to be treasured, and cared for as best he can.” His thumb stroke gently over hers, and she shivered. “Valued.”
This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. That he should say such wonderful things and could mean them so entirely, but only in the general sense.
And not specifically for her.
Except with the way he was looking at her, it would be so easy to believe that it was genuine, that it was more than duty, more than an abstract desire that she be happy here.
But she’d fooled herself before and had been so very hurt by it, and she could not afford to allow that to happen again.
So she smiled at him, and if it was brittle, it was still the best she could muster. “We should finish eating, before it gets cold.”
For a moment, she thought he appeared disappointed by her abrupt dismissal of the topic, but the expression cleared so quickly that she decided she must have imagined it. He released her hand and returned to his soup, and she picked at hers, no longer tasting it.
And when they went to bed that night, when his breath evened in sleep, she found that it was too hard, too painful, to lay here and pretend—to fight for sleep, so wholly aware of the warm body next to hers.
She felt stifled, the room strangely too hot, her chest tight and her skin itching with wakefulness. She needed to move, to do something, and she remembered those nights in the Wastes, when despair had made her little shelter nearly unbearable.
There had been sky then, open and endless, and she thought ruefully of Machrus’s attempt to decipher her needs so early in their marriage, thinking she would prefer sky over a home inside with him.
He was wrong then, but for now, she needed it.
The trunk would creak if she tried to open it in search of more clothing, so she left it all. She had her shawl, and her shoes were tucked neatly by the door, and she would simply return if the cold proved too much for her.
She opened the front door, the wind catching it so quickly that she had to scramble to keep it from banging on the wall, but she managed well enough, shutting it firmly behind her.
The sky was mostly smothered in clouds, a few patches in the distance revealing the stars, the pinpricks of light providing her just enough to manoeuvre the grasses without falling.
The night was cold, but felt delicious against her flushed skin, and the more she walked, the more her mind began to still, her thoughts began to settle.
And for just a moment, she felt free.
And then the clouds began to fall, tufts of white fluttering down to greet her, to soothe her, to brush chilly kisses against her upturned face, dissolving into nothing before she could truly investigate this new phenomena.
Yet for once she wasn’t frightened by its strangeness.
For this snow felt like it was falling just for her.
19. Snow
Renna did not walk with any purpose, simply kept a steady pace, not caring much for direction. She should have known that her feet would carry her somewhere familiar, through the sparse outcropping of trees and toward the river, still and dark in the night-time. It was harder to see here, the height of the trees conspiring with the clouds to keep as much light away as possible, but it was peaceful, and from her ventures with Machrus, she knew how to keep her footing until she was sitting once more on the rock she had come to think of as theirs.
She sat down, tucking her cold legs beneath her nightdress and bringing her shawl her around knees, sealing herself in as much as possible. The heated flush to her skin had succumbed to the chilled air, but, for once, it still felt refreshing rather than a persistent gnawing at her very bones.
She bent low, hiding her nose in the fibres of her shawl, trying not to think. It was easier to do when she was moving. Sitting here made her think of Machrus, of what he would be doing if he had joined her.
She grinned, despite herself. During the day he would be methodically unrolling his weapons from their case, deciding on which one he would fiddle with as they watched over the grenpeets. Now, however, he likely would simply be grumbling at being out of bed. Probably call her peculiar again. Somehow she could not quite take that as an insult, her stomach doing a funny sort of flip just to remember it.
There had been no grenpeets to greet her when she exited the house, their absence feeling strange already. He must have hidden them away in their burrows, away from the cold as they made little green heaps altogether.
She thought of doing that herself, of what it would be like to sleep nestled in Machrus’s arms, safe and warm, no more feeble boundary between them.
She should start walking now, back to her home, back to her people, just trudge along until she was far away from Machrus, from her feelings. Because they would never be requited. It would be easier if she was back with them, she decided. The agreement would stand—she would make sure both Desmond and Sladec understood that she was not leaving because of something Machrus had done—but it was simply too painful to stay here, to live with him, to hear him say all those lovely things and not truly mean them about her.
Except she was cowardly, and she doubted she could ever ask for a conference with Sladec, regardless if he called her sister. If it was simply a matter of disappearing, that she could do, but that would defeat the purpose of it all.
The snow was falling harder, this time no longer dissolving as it landed on her shawl, wisps of white settling and staying, friendly in its way.
Would Machrus miss her if she left? She wasn’t sure. He seemed a little different since his family came, his demeanour less surly than it had been. But that did not tell her much. If anything, she had served as an impediment to time with his family. He lived apart from them, certainly, but she wondered if he had happily spent at least some of his day up in the trees with them, before his anxious wife had disrupted his routine.
There was a muffled sound behind her and she turned, half expecting to see Machrus walking toward her. It seemed like something he’d do if he awoke and found her missing from his home. Not because he was worried for her, of course, but because she was his responsibility, and just as he took ample care of his grenpeets, he seemed determined to be attentive to her needs as well.
To please her, he’d said.
She doubted he knew how her mind could conjure all sorts of connotations for such a phrase, her cheeks burning at the memory.
But in the dark, she could not make out anything that resembled his figure. There were probably critters out here somewhere, darting about in their nightly business. The thought made her suddenly leery, but she tamped down her nervousness. She had been mostly mistaken as to the nature of the grenpeets, and tonight was for herself, for settling her thoughts and deter
mining her next course—not fretting over shuffling in the night.
But her peace had been disturbed, and that made the cold settle over her more acutely, so she stood, brushing off the snow as best she could, her joints stiff. She knew little of how the cold affected a person, the subject so irrelevant to her upbringing that it was almost laughable. Yet it likely was unwise to linger out here any longer, though she was sad for that. She hadn’t reached any decisions on what she should do about her husband, about herself, and that was irksome.
With a sigh, she turned to head back toward Machrus’s dwelling, grimacing when she realised that she’d nearly thought of it as home. Could it be home when she felt so conflicted about it? She didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything anymore.
Climbing down the rock was a slippery affair, her boots unable to find much traction against the snow and slick stone. But she managed, tripping only once, and she steadied herself before she could fall.
She thought ruefully of having to explain any scrapes or bruises to Machrus in the morning.
She did not notice them at first. She’d been preoccupied with navigating her way safely, dismissing most of her other surroundings.
There were... eyes. Only two of them, staring at her from a short distance away, two pinpricks of light in the surrounding dim. She froze, uncertain. The creature wasn’t moving, but she could make out nothing of its body, its location between her and the usual route home.
It could be friendly, she tried to reason, fear starting to prickle at her. Machrus had tried to explain that not everything was a danger to her. But he must have all those weapons for a reason, whether to protect the grenpeets or himself.
And she was too far to reach any of them.
The eyes disappeared, and she could not decide if that was good or bad. She’d never encountered an animal alone in the Wastes, other people had always been around her, ready to offer advice or—in a strictly practical sense—offer distraction to particularly vicious beasts so she was not its only prey.
Trade (Deridia Book 2) Page 27